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By 

KATHARINE  FULLERTON  GEROULD 


CONQinSTADOR 

VALIANT  DUST 

MODES  AND  MORALS 

A  CHANGE  OF  AIR 

HAWAII :  Scanes  and  Impressions 

VAIN  OBLATIONS 

THE  GREAT  TRADITION 


CHARLES    SCRIBNER'S   SONS 


HAWAII 

SCENES   AND    IMPRESSIONS 


HAWAII 

SCENES    AND    IMPRESSIONS 


BY 
KATHARINE  FULLERTON  GEROULD 


ILLUSTRATED   FSOM   PHOTOGRAPHS 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 

1923 


COPVEIGBT,  1916,  BY 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


Published  September,  1916 


TO 
G.  H.  G. 


8464 66 


PREFACE 

Of  all  the  books  that  have  been  written 
on  Hawaii,  the  pages  that  follow  consti- 
tute the  least  pretentious.  Mine,  indeed, 
is  a  book  at  all  only  by  accident  of  phys- 
ical form.  It  boasts  no  architectonics, 
scarcely  even  a  beginning  and  an  end.  Its 
sole  unity  is  the  unity  derived  from  being 
the  record,  by  a  single  pen,  of  some  of  the 
experiences  of  a  single  month.  It  wanders 
almost  consciously;  it  leaps  from  the  gen- 
eral to  the  intimate  and  particular  with  no 
apology,  with  hardly  even  a  transition.  In 
that  sense,  it  is  ragged — ragged  like  almost 
any  month  of  life. 

Yet  it  falls  already,  for  me — that  brief 
season — into  a  memory  that  "composes.'* 
[vii] 


PREFACE 

In  that  month,  thick-packed  with  happy- 
adventures  of  eye  and  ear,  it  is  hard  for 
one's  nostalgic  mood  to  recall  one  jarring 
note  or  one  unlucky  tint.  The  remembered 
sweetness  of  Hawaiian  voices  has  haunted 
each  sentence  as  it  was  written;  palms 
should  droop  over  every  page;  the  white 
Pacific  surf  should  beat  round  every  mar- 
gin. It  has,  in  memory,  the  unity  at  least 
of  a  curious  and  varied  perfection.  I  have 
tried  not  to  vex  the  pages  with  history  or 
statistics — except  where  such  are  registered 
first  of  all  by  one's  own  senses,  or  dog  an 
impression  unescapably.  "Information"  I 
have  tried  modestly  to  leave  to  the  ency- 
clopaedic mind.  But — and  here  is  my  only 
defense — if  I  have  contrived  to  suggest  a 
tithe  of  the  beauties  of  that  "loveliest  fleet 
of  islands,"  to  inspire  one  creature  with  an 
effective  desire  to  go  and  taste  for  himself, 
I  can  claim  one  virtue.  The  half  is  not 
[viii] 


PREFACE 

told;  and  Hawaii  waits  with  open  arms, 
under  the  Southern  Cross,  to  give  more 
than  I  have  even  hinted.  My  great  fear 
is  simply  that  I  have  not  hinted  enough. 
These  pages  are  the  wandering  record  of 
a  month — with  how  many  crowding  plea- 
sures, social  and  aesthetic,  of  necessity  left 
out!  My  context  is  richer  than  my  page; 
my  memory  than  my  manuscript.  If  you 
travel  undominated  by  a  fixed  idea,  it  must 
be  so.  Only  those  under  vows  can  defy 
the  unexpected  and  make  of  their  days  a 
pattern.  Our  adventure  was  rich,  brief, 
an  unforeseen  and  beautiful  motley.  A 
full  third  of  the  little  book  goes  to  descrip- 
tion of  a  place  most  Islanders  ignore,  a 
place  as  untypical  and  "special"  as  any 
in  the  world:  the  Leper  Settlement  on 
Molokai.  That  in  itseK  would  destroy 
"unity";  though  it  is  positively  the  finest 
of  our  memories. 

[ix] 


PREFACE 

Nor  is  there  even  unity  in  the  group  to 
which  I  owe  thanks.  But  I  beg  that  all 
those  who  know  that  I  have  reason  to  be 
grateful  to  them  will  take  to  themselves  my 
tacit  acknowledgment.  Explicit,  it  might  | 
seem  to  be  oddly  shared.  At  all  events,  to 
those  who,  in  their  different  ways,  made 
the  adventure  possible  and  made  it  what  it 
was,  I  humbly  offer  the  record — in  the 
phrase  of  the  prophet,  "a  basket  of  summer 
fruit." 

K.  F.  G. 


[xl 


CONTENTS 

Honolulu:  The  Melting-Pot     ....        1 

By- Ways  m  Hawah 59 

Ka.laupapa:    The   Leper   Settlement    on 

Molokai 119 


i^: 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

Distant  view  of  the  federal  experimental  station, 

Kalawao Frontispiece 

FACINQ 
PAGE 

Honolulu  harbor 8 

The  Kanaka  is  amphibious — all  his  life,  naturally  in 

and  out  of  the  water 12 

Rice-field  and  cocoanut-trees 18 

In  the  gardens  at  Ainahau 22 

Diamond  Head  from  Tantalus — Oahu      ....  28 

Waikiki  Beach,  Honolulu 84 

Good  golf  is  provided  at  the  Oahu  Country  Club, 

Honolulu 36 

Ape-ape — Pohakumoa  Gulch 44 

The  Pali— Island  of  Oahu 56 

Kalihiwai,  Kauai 64 

Cane  flume  on  Hawaii 68 

Onomea,  native  village  on  Hawaii 76 

lao  Needle  in  lao  Valley — near  Wailuku        ...  88 
[  xiii  ] 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACINQ 
PAGE 

Haleakala,  looking  across  Koolau  Gap  from  one  of 

the  small  inside  craters 92 

The  narrow-gauge  railway  between   Kahuku  and 

Hauula 100 

The  Sacred  Falls  of  Kaliuwaa 104 

Brother  Joseph  Dutton  at  the  grave  of  Father  Da- 
mien  132 

Homes  of  the  better  class  of  lepers  on  the  island  of 

Molokai 144 

Smiday  morning  in  Kalaupapa 156 

Father  Damien's  church,  Kalawao 160 

The  Baldwin  Home  for  boys  at  Kalawao  ....     168 

The  compound  of  the  superintendent  and  physicians 

at  Kalaupapa,  showing  the  Pali  in  the  distance     170 

Kalaupapa  from  Pali 174 

Map  showing  travel  routes  among  the  Hawaiian 

Islands At  end  of  volume 


[xiv] 


HONOLULU:    THE  MELTING-POT 


HONOLTJT.U:    THE  MELTING-POT 

THEY  have  a  name  in  Hawaii  for 
such  as  we — malihinisy  newcomers 
— ^in  contrast  to  the  Island-born  or 
the  Island-bred,  the  "old-timers,"  who  are 
kamaainas.  In  any  account  of  foreign 
places  not  purely  aesthetic  and  sensuous, 
there  should  be  a  residuum  of  confessed 
ignorance.  The  foreigners  that  drift  to 
usward  on  fickle  wing,  then  write  books 
longer  than  their  total  sojourn  with  us, 
are  our  malihinis;  and  we  all  know  with 
what  seas-full  of  salt  we  take  their  ac- 
counts of  America.  A  traveller  must  flat- 
ter himself  that  his  eyes  have  caught  the 
truth,  or  for  very  shame  he  could  not 
write.  But  we  malihinis  of  a  month  must 
have  inevitably,  in  the  background  of  our 
[3] 


HAWAII: 

minds,  the  patient,  quizzical  smile  of  the 
kamaaina.  The  malihinVs  dearest  hope  is 
not  to  turn  that  smile  to  a  frown.  This, 
as  of  obligation,  from  one  who  has  but 
passed,  to  those  whose  roots  have  struck 
deep  in  the  gentlest  soil  of  earth.  .  .  . 

To  most  people  who  have  never  been 
to  the  Islands,  and  who  have  never  con- 
templated going  there  long  enough  to 
get  up  a  Hawaiian  dossier,  the  name  of 
Honolulu  suggests,  perhaps,  half  a  dozen 
things:  sugar,  surf-riding,  volcanoes,  lets, 
missionaries,  and  foi.  I  doubt,  at  all 
events,  if  the  list  is  much  larger;  and  I 
am  not  sure  that  to  include  both  leis  and 
foi  is  not  to  be  too  generous.  I  am  not 
speaking  of  sophisticated  creatures  on  the 
"Coast"  who,  whether  or  not  they  have 
run  "down"  to  Honolulu  themselves,  can  be 
glib  about  friends  who  have  run  "down." 
[41 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

Certainly  we  knew  originally  little  more 
than  the  list  suggests.  But  knowledge 
somehow  bursts  upon  one  when  one  is 
contemplating  a  specific  journey:  the  de- 
tached air  of  the  steamship  clerk  and  the 
railway  agent  breed  in  one  a  kind  of  know- 
ingness.  Long  before  we  saw  Diamond 
Head  we  had  made  a  hundred  traveller's 
choices,  and  could  be  glib,  ourselves,  about 
Island  problems.  We  had  made  out  not 
only  that  Honolulu  was  the  tourist's  para- 
dise— our  luggage-labels  said  so — but  also 
that  it  was  a  paradise  with  a  grievance. 
Free  sugar,  the  seaman's  bill,  the  prevail- 
ingly yellow  tinge  of  the  population,  and 
the  perishing  Hawaiian  were  all  familiar 
formulae  before  a  single  maile  wreath  had 
been  flung  about  our  necks.  There  were 
Island  people  on  the  steamer;  and  wherever 
Island  people  are  met  together,  to  pass  the 
time  or  to  instruct  the  stranger.  Island 
[51 


HAWAII: 

problems  are  hot  in  the  mouth.  To  talk 
about  the  insularity  of  an  island  is  to  be 
tautological;  but  the  insular  American  on 
Oahu  is  more  insular,  so  to  speak,  than  the 
insular  Englishman  in  London.  England 
is  the  centre  of  an  empire;  but  Hawaii  is 
the  mere  outpost  of  a  republic:  a  Terri- 
tory, something  as  helpless  in  the  hands  of 
Congress  as  a  ward  in  chancery  is  help- 
less; bent  therefore  on  self-preservation 
solely,  and  on  keeping  up  its  own  little 
state  and  luxury  in  its  own  little  mid- 
Pacific  Eden. 

Islanders  are  not  interested  in  the  "  Great 
War" — not  as  we  of  the  East  understand 
interest:  their  newspapers  confess  it.  Very 
few  of  them  are  interested  even  in  a  possible 
Japanese  complication;  Mexico  is  as  naught 
to  them.  So  far,  they  but  accentuate  the 
general  indifference  (excepting  always  Cali- 
fornia's an ti- Japanese  frenzy)  of  the  States 
[6] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

west  of  the  Mississippi.  Though  the  Is- 
lands look  so  Oriental,  they  are  in  many 
ways  Western  of  the  Western.  Not  only 
are  they  not  internationally  minded;  they 
are  not  even  nationally  minded.  They 
are  almost  more  "sectional"  than  the 
"solid"  South  or  the  State  of  Utah.  Life, 
liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness,  for 
the  Islander,  are  bound  up  in  sugar.  Hinc 
nice  lacrimoe. 

Yes,  the  grievances  of  this  paradise 
stir  one  to  wrath  on  the  steamer — though 
they  sink  into  the  background  after  one 
lands  and  the  pleasures  of  the  eye  are 
pre-eminent.  Except,  that  is,  as  the  griev- 
ances touch  one  personally.  The  coast- 
wise shipping  law  touched  us  nearly: 
thanks  to  our  inability  to  pick  and  choose 
among  steamers,  we  could  not  stay  to  see 
Kauai.  It  is  maddening  to  see  good  Jap- 
anese boats  steam  out  half  empty,  and 
[7] 


HAWAII: 

to  be  restricted — now  that  the  Pacific 
Mail  steamers  have  had  to  stop  business 
— to  one  overcrowded  Hne.  The  mys- 
teries of  sugar,  in  all  their  detail,  I  could 
not  hope  to  penetrate;  though  I  thought 
it  quite  clear  at  the  time  that  Hawaii 
cannot  compete  with  Cuba.  Thence  re- 
sulted a  wry-mouthed  admiration  of  our 
doctrinaire  democracy.  Is  it  not  like  us 
(one  asks  with  tearful  pride)  to  fight  Spain 
for  Cuban  freedom,  and  to  crown  that 
activity  by  presenting  Cuba  with  the 
world's  market  for  cane-sugar,  destroy- 
ing our  domestic  industries?  The  war  is 
temporarily  keeping  the  Hawaiian  cane- 
fields  from  tragic  fallowness;  but  free 
sugar  may  well  outlast  the  war.  Let  no 
man  say  we  are  not  altruistic.  "The 
gray  beard  of  Uncle  Sam"  (I  scribbled 
frantically  with  Honolulu  harbor  spread 
prismatically  before  my  eyes)  "is  as  wild 
[8] 


i 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

in  the  air  as  ever  Don  Quixote's."  As  for 
the  Japanese,  no  Islander  will  give  any 
real  comfort  to  the  chauvinist.  There  is 
no  Yellow  Peril.  They  begin  saying  it  a 
little  past  the  Farralones,  and  they  are 
still  saying  it  when  the  rosy  pallor  of 
Diamond  Head  first  takes  your  breath 
away  at  dawn.  Then  you  drift  into  waters 
that  are  like  the  harbors  of  a  sunset  sky; 
the  more  acrid  chapter  of  preconception 
ends,  while  the  sweeter  one  of  experience 
begins. 

Hawaii  is  a  melting-pot:  that  is  the 
first  thing,  perhaps,  to  strike  one,  humanly 
speaking.  The  strictly  Polynesian  effect 
lurks  rather  in  the  air,  the  foliage,  the 
sky  and  the  sea:  the  ever  delightful,  never 
conventional  decor  of  the  Pacific  island. 
True,  you  find,  now  and  then,  tucked 
away  under  its  coco-palms  on  thunderous 
shores,  a  Hawaiian  village  all  complete 
[9] 


HAWAII: 

with  its  taro-patches,  its  fish-nets,  its  out- 
rigger canoes  drawn  up  on  the  sand,  its 
lazy  hfe,  and  its  innocence  of  English. 
But  you  have  now  to  go  far  afield  for  such. 
The  bulk  of  the  Island  population,  as 
every  one  knows,  is  Japanese — some  90,- 
000  as  against  some  24,000  Hawaiians  and 
an  equal  number  of  "all  Caucasians." 
Then  come  Portuguese  (for  some  reason 
not  reckoned  officially  as  Caucasians)  and 
Chinese,  nearly  even  in  the  census  lists — 
23,000  and  21,000,  respectively.  Part- 
Hawaiians  (a  motley  breed !)  and  Filipinos 
pair,  farther  down,  with  some  14,000  each. 
There  are  a  few  thousand  each  of  Porto 
Ricans,  Spanish,  and  "all  others." 

Yet  this  melting-pot  is  not  depressing 
like  that  which  you  get  the  full  sense  of, 
say,  on  lower  Fifth  Avenue  at  noon.  In 
Hawaii,  save  for  a  few  Russian  peasants, 
there  are  no  Slavs;  there  are  no  Jews; 
[10] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

there  are  virtually  no  negroes;  there  is 
no  Levantine  scum.  The  Mediterranean 
coast,  from  Gibraltar  to  Sicily,  from  Sic- 
ily to  Jaffa  and  Crete  and  Constantino- 
ple, is  unrepresented;  Central  Europe  and 
the  Balkans  have  sent  nothing.  No  Ru- 
thenians,  no  Slovaks,  no  Lithuanians,  no 
Armenians,  no  Huns.  A  few  Greek  hotel- 
keepers  serve  to  make  life  tolerable  in  the 
smaller  towns;  but  in  numbers  the  Greeks 
hardly  count.  Even  in  Honolulu  the  white 
man  is  in  a  visual  minority;  and  outside 
Honolulu  nearly  all  the  faces  are  yellow 
or  brown.  The  Hawaiian  melting-pot  at 
first  is  picturesque;  it  ends  by  being  lova- 
ble— and  being  missed.  Even  the  pessi- 
mist may  find  comfort  in  the  fact  that  the 
Oriental  has  no  vote.  The  fat  babies  in 
rainbow  kimonos  will  have  them;  but 
that  story  is  for  another  day.  The  Anglo- 
Saxon  is  still  dominant. 
[Ill 


HAWAII: 

The  Hawaiian  has  the  ballot — and  in 
consequence  the  Hawaiian  vote  is  the 
largest  in  the  Islands — ^but  his  vote  will 
pass  with  his  existence;  which  means  that 
he  will  not  long  trouble  the  polls.  Civili- 
zation has  killed  him,  as  is  its  w^ay:  vice 
and  disease  came  in  with  the  sea-captains 
and  sailors  of  all  the  globe,  and  the  mis- 
sionaries finished  the  work.  As  far  as 
one  can  make  out,  the  missionaries  were 
more  responsible  than  Captain  Cook  or 
the  New  Bedford  whalers,  for  the  Hawaiian 
is  dying,  quite  literally,  of  clothes.  Tu- 
berculosis, pneumonia,  and  bronchitis  are 
what  carry  him  off  in  far  the  largest 
numbers.  The  race  is  not  weak  or  de- 
generate: it  is,  physically,  magnificent  in 
strength  and  beautiful  of  feature.  But 
the  Kanaka  is  amphibious — fishing,  surf- 
riding,  swimming,  he  is,  all  his  life,  natu- 
rally in  and  out  of  the  water.  It  is  one 
[12] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

thing  to  cover  yourself  with  palm-oil  and 
let  the  Pacific  spray  run  off  you  in  shin- 
ing drops  while  you  rest  on  the  sands;  it 
is  quite  another  to  keep  your  wet  clothes 
on  as  you  go  about  your  business  on  the 
shore — but  it  is  to  ask  too  much  of  Poly- 
nesian intelligence  to  request  it  to  see  the 
difference.  If  clothes  are  good,  they  are 
good,  wet  or  dry.  If  you  do  not  yourself 
perceive  the  initial  beauty  of  clothes,  you 
cannot  be  very  sophisticated  about  their 
uses.  The  Kanaka  is  not  up  to  Sartor 
Resartus.  That  the  Polynesian  has  never 
employed  his  keen  aesthetic  sense  on  the 
matter  of  dress  is  proved,  I  think,  by  the 
fact  that  the  native  women  still  univer- 
sally wear  the  holoku — a  shapeless  Mother 
Hubbard  gown  which  the  most  tasteless 
Puritan  could  not  condemn.  Tradition 
says  that  the  first  missionary  ladies,  in 
mad  haste  to  dress  their  converts,  handed 
[13] 


HAWAII: 

over  the  patterns  of  their  own  nightgowns. 
A  race  (I  submit)  that  has  stuck  faith- 
fully for  nearly  a  hundred  years  to  the 
model  of  our  great-grandmothers'  night- 
dresses— ^for  "best"  as  well  as  for  every 
day — is  a  docile,  an  admirable,  a  lovable 
race,  which  "vaunteth  not  itself  and  is 
not  puffed  up."  It  is  almost  a  pity,  too, 
hygienically  speaking,  that  the  grass  house 
has  become  unfashionable.  It  is  engaging 
of  the  Kanaka  to  build  himself  a  wooden 
shack  to  live  in  because  white  men  live  in 
wooden  houses  and  provide  such  for  their 
laborers;  but  there  is  nothing  particularly 
amiable  in  opening  your  windows  at  night, 
and,  since  his  fine  tact  is  all  social  and  not 
in  the  least  scientific,  he  does  not  open 
them.  The  grass  house  ventilated  itself, 
and  the  wooden  shack  does  not.  Hence 
more  tuberculosis,  more  bronchitis,  more 
pneumonia.  The  women  hang  leis  about 
[14] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

their  necks,  and  all  the  men  wear  flower- 
wreaths  round  their  junk-shop  American 
hats.  To  the  charm  ancestrally  perceived 
they  are  faithful;  but  they  have  never 
learned  to  improve  on  Caucasian  ideas. 
They  have  accepted  the  brutal  fact  of 
clothes,  just  as  they  Christianized  them- 
selves en  masse;  they  have  accepted  the 
silly  American  standard  of  the  wooden 
house.  But  you  must  not  expect  them 
to  go  further:  you  must  not  expect  them 
to  like  to  work,  or  to  care  how  their  fool- 
ish clothes  look  (if  we  were  made  to  wear 
barrels,  I  dare  say  we  should  feel  a  like  in- 
difiference  to  fashions  in  hoops  and  staves) 
or  to  think  about  cubic  feet  of  air. 

It  works  the  same  way,  I  fancy,  with 
religion.  **They  say  what  they  think 
will  please  you,"  was  the  report  of  a 
hamaaina  who  came  of  the  old  mission- 
ary stock  and  who  had  worked  much 
[15  1 


HAWAII: 

among  Hawaiians.  Of  course  they  do: 
they  are  poHte  to  the  death — hterally. 
The  idols  were  officially  broken,  by  royal 
order,  even  before  the  missionaries  ar- 
rived; and  when  the  missionaries  came, 
the  Hawaiians  embraced  Christianity  about 
as  simply  as  France  did  under  Clovis. 
They  are  Christians,  and  have  been,  now, 
for  some  three  generations;  but  they  will 
not  build  where  there  has  been  a  heiau* 
and  their  propitiatory  offerings  to  Pele 
line  all  the  sombre  trail  to  the  Sacred  Falls 
of  Kaliuwaa.  Every  kamaaina  can  give 
you  some  authentic  tale  of  some  one  who 
has  been  kahuna-ed — ^prayed  to  death. 
Officially  the  kahuna  is  proscribed:  there 
is  a  price  on  his  head.  But  the  authentic 
tales  are  there;  and  indeed  I  have  seen 
lost  villages  where  a  kahuna  would  be  very 
safe  from  the  short  arm  of  the  law. 

*  A  native  temple. 
[16] 


SCENES  AND   IMPRESSIONS 

Such  docility,  such  unwilHngness  to  be 
rude,  such  indifference  to  the  logic  of  the 
laws  by  which  the  natives  must  now  live, 
do  not  make  for  self-preservation.  They 
make  for  listlessness,  for  forgetting  stren- 
uous traditions,  for  seizing  the  day,  for 
making  leis,  and  singing  sad  and  idle  mu- 
sic by  the  incomparable  Pacific.  Politi- 
cally the  Hawaiians  have  no  hope:  Amer- 
ica has  absorbed  them;  they  know  they 
are  dying,  though  they  do  not  quite  know 
why;  but  they  have  not  enough  stern- 
ness or  strength  for  the  black  pessimism 
that  Stevenson  recorded  among  their 
cousins,  the  cannibal  Marquesans.  The 
old  meles  and  the  old  hero-tales  are  nearly 
forgotten,  as  are  the  old  hulas.  A  few 
aged  men  and  women  can  still  sing  and 
dance  in  traditional  fashion  for  their  aged 
Queen — but  there  is  no  one  to  whom  they 
can  pass  on  the  words  of  the  songs  or 
[17] 


HAWAII: 

the  motions  of  the  dance.  The  new  songs 
are  different — lyrical  at  best,  never  epic; 
and  the  new  dances  might  perhaps  de- 
light a  cabaret,  if  any  cabaret  could  con- 
ceivably be  allowed  to  present  them.  I 
have  seen  a  native  hula  in  a  country  vil- 
lage, in  full  swing  after  hours  of  feasting; 
and  the  muscle-dancing  of  expositions  is 
innocuous  beside  it — though  far  more  dis- 
gusting because  not  spontaneous.  The 
old  hulas  were  different:  were  stately  and, 
I  dare  say,  a  little  tiresome,  with  their 
monotonous  swaying  and  arm-gestures  re- 
peated a  thousand  times.  Only  a  very  old 
person  now  can  dance  in  the  earlier  fashion ; 
you  could  easily  count  up  the  Hawaiians 
who  know  the  meles;  and  there  is  just  one 
man,  I  believe,  left  on  Oahu  (if  indeed  he 
is  still  living)  who  can  play  the  nose-flute 
as  it  should  be  played,  to  the  excruciation 
of  every  nerve  in  a  Caucasian  body. 
f  18  1 


From  a  photograph  by  R.  W.  Perkins 

Rice-field  and  c-ocoanut-trees. 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

Regular  work  is  almost  an  impossi- 
bility to  the  Polynesian;  therefore  he  is 
seldom,  if  ever,  to  be  found  in  the  cane 
or  pineapple  fields.  He  is  very  strong, 
and  makes  an  excellent  stevedore;  and 
that  employment  suits  him,  for  he  can 
leave  it  and  come  back  to  it  as  he  chooses. 
The  ships  come  in  from  Australia  and  the 
South  Seas,  from  the  Orient  or  round  the 
Horn;  and  whenever  they  come  in  or  go 
out,  there  is  work  a-plenty.  Until  his 
money  is  gone  he  can  exist  beautifully, 
singing  to  his  ukulele  and  washing  down 
his  raw  fish  and  poi  with  square-face. 
He  makes  occasionally  a  good  chauffeur; 
but  the  regular  profession  most  dear  to 
him  is  that  of  policeman.  To  stand  di- 
recting traffic  at  King  and  Fort  Streets, 
his  beautiful  poses  plastiques  legitimized 
by  authority,  is  as  near  heaven,  I  fancy, 
as  a  serious-minded  Hawaiian  can  get. 
[191 


HAWAH: 

In  Honolulu — and  Honolulu  draws  to 
itself,  magnet-wise,  all  the  interests  and 
activities  of  Oahu — the  white  man  is  more 
in  evidence  than  anywhere  else  on  the 
Islands.  That  is  natural.  It  is  the  social 
and  commercial  metropolis,  the  capital, 
the  traditional  home  of  most  of  the  mis- 
sionaries, the  residence  still  of  the  Queen, 
the  centre  of  military  and  naval  business, 
the  pre-eminent  port  of  the  Islands.  In 
Honolulu  itself  the  melting-pot  seems  to 
seethe  most  hotly;  for  the  white  man  is 
there  in  numbers  to  remind  you  of  the 
extraordinary  foreignness  of  the  other  hu- 
man beings  who  frequent  the  paved  streets, 
ride  on  the  familiar  trolley-cars,  and  pour 
out  of  the  "movies"  at  the  classic  hours. 
Away  from  Honolulu  you  often  forget  the 
white  man:  the  tropics  beat  in  on  you 
more  vividly;  the  great  tree-ferns  rise 
mysteriously  above  your  head;  the  surf  is 
[20] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

the  surf  of  the  South  Seas;  the  world  is 
wholly  different;  and  it  is  very  curious  and 
exotic  of  you  yourself  to  be  white.  Save 
for  the  mental  mirror  all  people  carry  about 
with  them,  one  would  forget  one  was.  But 
Honolulu  is  American,  very.  It  is  even 
part  of  its  charm  that  it  should  be  so;  for 
there  is  nothing  pathetic,  no  savor  of  ex- 
ile, in  the  resolute  dominance  of  American 
ways.  The  Islanders  are  not  backward- 
looking,  like  (we  are  told)  Englishmen  in 
India.  Honolulu  is  "home,"  and  they 
look  as  little  to  the  mainland  (save,  now 
and  then,  sardonically  to  Washington) 
as  the  Westerner  looks  to  the  Atlantic 
coast.  They  have  not  even  had  to  com- 
pound with  the  climate,  for  the  climate 
is  quite  simply  perfect.  They  can  afford 
not  to  seek  their  greatest  comfort;  for, 
after  all,  it  is  impossible  to  be  very  uncom- 
fortable. It  is  the  tourist,  the  visitor,  who 
[21] 


HAWAII: 

wears  Palm  Beach  clothes  and  soft  collars. 
The  business  man  of  Honolulu  dresses  as 
the  business  man  in  New  York  dresses — 
tweeds,  starched  neck-gear,  and  all.  Most 
men  wear  black  evening  clothes  at  dinner. 
A  certain  amount  of  white  is  worn,  of 
course;  but  the  general  impression  of  the 
visitor  from  the  temperate  zone  is  that 
these  folk  do  not  live  up  to  their  privileges. 
As  for  their  houses,  I  should  positively 
hesitate  to  say  how  bad  Island  archi- 
tecture is,  if  so  quintessential  an  Islander 
as  Mr.  W.  R.  Castle,  Jr.,  had  not  said 
it  before  me.  Life  in  Hawaii  is  lived  un- 
der the  palm  and  the  mango,  the  banyan 
and  the  poinciana,  the  algaroba  and  the 
monkey-pod.  The  great  hibiscus  hedges 
are  as  high  as,  in  England,  the  border  of 
ancestral  yew;  the  night-blooming  cereus 
hangs  in  multitudinous  clusters  over  your 
garden-wall;  the  scent  of  ginger  is  heavy 
[22] 


From  a  photograph  by  R.  W.  Perkins. 

In  the  gardens  at  Ainaliau. 
Life  io  Hawaii  is  lived  under  the  palm  and  the  mango. 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

round  vour  lanai;  the  orange  and  the  hme 
bloom  in  your  compound,  and  the  guava 
runs  wild  by  the  wayside;  your  yard-boy 
eats  his  dinner  under  a  banana-tree.  A 
garden  is  old  in  ten  years;  in  thirty  it  has 
become  a  tropical  forest,  a  gigantic  and 
fragrant  gloom.  But  the  houses  breathe 
none  of  all  this.  They  are  hardly  ever 
even  Southern  in  type — low  and  pillared 
and  wide-verandahed.  The  architecture 
of  Hawaii  is  uncompromising;  it  is — for 
want  of  a  better  word  let  me  say  evan- 
gelical. It  stands  rigidly  by  the  worst 
traditions  of  the  nineteenth  century;  it 
is  the  same  that  disfigures  our  New  Eng- 
land streets  and  stultifies  the  fine  situa- 
tion of  many  a  Western  town.  Two  stories 
and  sometimes  three;  scamped  porches  set 
about  with  jig-saw  decoration;  colors  that 
must  make  the  gentle  Jap  swear  ritually 
as  he  patters  by  in  his  immaculate  kimono : 
[23  1 


HAWAII: 

the  kind  of  thing  that  is  quaint  and  endear- 
ing in  Portland,  Oregon,  but  which,  in  the 
full  sweetness  of  the  Trade,  is  simply  the 
Great  Refusal.  Not  much  better,  from 
this  point  of  view,  is  the  newer  house, 
half  timbered  or  of  tapestry  brick;  for  if 
there  ever  was  a  place  with  which  the 
Tudors  and  their  ways  and  works  had 
nothing  to  do,  it  is  the  islands  of  the 
Pacific.  Chinese  merchants  are  inheriting 
the  older  houses  in  the  town;  but  the  re- 
leased Americans,  who  go  farther  up  the 
Manoa  or  the  Nuuanu  Valley,  do  not  al- 
ways improve  on  their  ancestral  homes. 
There  is  melancholy  comfort  to  a  monarch- 
ically  inclined  person  in  the  fact  that  Liliuo- 
kalani  lives  in  the  loveliest  house  in  Hono- 
lulu. Washington  Place,  which  she  now 
inhabits,  is  of  the  old  Southern  type,  and 
it  does  not  insult  the  vegetation.  (As  for 
the  Royal  Palace — now  the  Executive 
[24] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

Building — I  believe  I  am  alone  in  ad- 
miring it.  It  is  of  absurdly  ornamented 
type,  but  so  like  many  a  bad  minor  pal- 
ace in  Europe  that  it  endears  itself.  The 
throne-room  is  just  what  any  petty  sov- 
ereign would  have  found  fit,  and  the 
space  and  height  of  the  rooms  are  liter- 
ally palatial.  There  is  something  very  fine 
and  aesthetically  decent  about  the  sweep 
of  the  broad  stone  galleries,  and  the  slow, 
lavish  curve  of  the  central  staircase.  Ka- 
mehameha's  statue,  in  bronze  and  gold, 
faces  the  palace  majestically  across  the 
square;  and  that,  too,  is  fine,  though  no 
one  now  pays  homage  except  an  ancient 
Portuguese  lunatic,  who  spends  his  life  be- 
fore it.)  Some  people  have  had  the  wit 
to  build  low,  shingled  bungalows,  and 
they  will  have  paradise  about  them  when 
they  die.  But  it  verily  seems  as  though 
no  sensitive  soul  could  make  its  peace 
[25] 


HAWAII: 

with  God  while  the  poinciana  and  the 
banyan  look  down  on  tortured  clap-board- 
ing, built  into  a  high  and  narrow  shape. 
Were  I  to  cite  exceptions — and  of  course 
there  are  exceptions — it  would  be  almost 
like  naming  names,  so  I  refrain.  Nor  do  I 
speak  of  interiors,  only  of  the  front  pre- 
sented to  the  world.  But  it  is  a  great  pity 
that  some  young  architect  with  a  sense  of 
fitness  does  not  feel  "called'*  to  make 
man's  part  in  the  aspect  of  Honolulu  a 
little  more  akin  to  God's.  The  Atlantic 
States  had  Georgian  memories  to  help 
them  out;  California  has  had  Spain;  but 
Hawaii  is  singularly  isolated.  The  natives, 
of  course,  contributed  no  architectural 
ideas.  It  is  a  singular  misfortune  that 
the  Islanders  should  have  selected,  and 
stuck  at,  the  wrong  period.  It  was  not 
because  they  had  never  had  anything  else 
before  their  eyes:  nothing  could  be  more 
[26] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

charming  than  Washington  Place  in  Hon- 
olulu, or  the  old  ''missionary  house"  in 
Lahaina,  on  Maui.  They  did  not,  however, 
stick  to  the  good  aesthetics  of  the  pioneers; 
they  progressed:  they  seem  to  have  gone 
to  Kansas  for  their  later  inspiration — and 
never  to  have  come  away. 

When  that  is  said,  nothing  remains  to 
be  charged  against  civilization  in  Hon- 
olulu. This  in  itself  would  be  small  cause 
for  petulance  in  another  place.  But  here 
the  eye  enters  upon  an  inheritance  so 
gorgeous  beyond  preconception  that  it 
shrinks  unwontedly  from  all  that  is  not 
beauty. 

The  part  of  the  town  that  is  not  occu- 
pied by  Americans  is  oddly  uninterest- 
ing. Here  and  there  a  district  known  as 
"Portuguee  town"  contributes  a  vivid  pink 
house  to  the  general  audacity.  But  the 
Chinese  and  Japanese  districts  are  far 
[27] 


HAWAII: 

less  picturesque  than  the  Oriental  quarter 
in  San  Francisco — even  since  the  "fire." 
Rows  and  rows  of  barrack-like  tenements, 
housing  Hawaiians  and  the  poorer  Ori- 
entals, are  very  like  any  other  slums — 
save  that  here  the  sun  toill  find  out  a  way. 
It  is  a  platitude  that  foreign  slums — Ital- 
ian, for  example — are  often  picturesque. 
In  Honolulu  they  scarcely  are;  for  the 
buildings  are  not  old,  and  they  make  the 
most  colorless  corner  of  that  parti-colored 
world.  Prosperity,  I  suppose,  makes  for 
gayer  kimonos,  for  paler  stuffs  in  Chinese 
coats  and  trousers,  for  more  leis  and 
fresher  flowers  setting  off  the  Hawaiian 
bronze.  The  folk  who  live  in  the  Hono- 
lulu tenements  are  very  poor;  "drab"  is 
the  formal  epithet  for  poverty,  and  with 
drab  even  the  sun  can  do  little.  The 
poorer  quarters  of  Honolulu  are  not  so 
depressing  as  some  other  slums;  for  until 
[28] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

one  is  quite  used  to  the  visual  preponder- 
ance of  yellow  and  brown  men,  there  is 
delight  in  the  mere  strangeness  of  the 
crowds.  And  they  are  not  so  extensive, 
these  poorer  quarters;  they  are  far  out- 
stripped by  the  comfort  and  beauty  of 
the  rest.  Still,  in  this  sociological  day, 
who  could  refrain  from  noticing,  and  men- 
tioning, such  slums  as  there  are  ? 

Another  feature  prominent  in  the  mere 
aspect  of  Honolulu  is  the  army.  We  have 
seven  or  eight  thousand  troops  there;  it 
is  a  regulation  for  Hawaii  that  officers 
and  men  alike  must  wear  uniform;  and 
the  ugly,  efficient  khaki  is  everywhere,  as 
well  as  the  tropical  white.  On  the  whole, 
the  khaki  uniform  is  less  beautiful  than 
the  holoku;  and  the  military  note  is  a 
note  of  pure  ugliness.  After  a  few  weeks 
the  negro  regiments  seem  strange  to  the 
eye.  It  is  impossible  not  to  match  up 
[29  1 


HAWAII: 

the  negro  type  against  the  Polynesian  and 
find  it  wanting.  An  aesthetically  passion- 
ate person  can  quite  understand  the  con- 
tempt with  which  the  Hawaiian  looks  down 
upon  the  black  man.  This,  though  the 
negro  soldier  is  usually  a  fine  creature, 
physically  speaking,  and  at  his  best  sug- 
gests the  imposing  Zulu.  It  is  the  mod- 
elhng  of  the  Polynesian  countenance  that 
gives  the  Hawaiian  the  palm:  the  delicate 
aquihne  contour,  the  eyes  large  for  the 
face,  the  thick  hair,  like  a  European's, 
crowning  the  head. 

Geographically,  too,  the  army  counts 
immensely  in  Oahu.  There  are  five  forts 
in  or  about  Honolulu  town,  not  to  men- 
tion Schofield  Barracks  on  a  neighboring 
plateau.  Diamond  Head  is  mined  and 
galleried,  so  that  on  occasion  it  could  be 
as  dangerous  as  in  its  volcanically  "ac- 
tive" days.  The  monstrous  works  going 
[30  1 


SCENES  AND  BIPRESSIONS 

on  at  Pearl  Harbor  it  would  take  an  ex- 
pert to  appreciate;  at  present  they  are  in 
the  least  illuminating  of  all  stages — that 
of  dredging.  A  visit  to  Pearl  Harbor — 
a  strange,  octopus-shaped  arm  of  the  sea 
— is  about  as  unrewarding  for  the  com- 
mon person  as  a  visit  to  a  sugar-mill. 
Our  New  England  consciences  took  us  to 
both;  and,  personally,  I  brought  back 
from  the  adventures  only  the  conviction 
that  dredging  is  not  pretty  to  look  at  and 
that  sugar-cane  is  not  good  to  chew. 
Those  who  like  to  chew  sugar-cane  may 
very  fairly  infer  that  I  have  done  little 
justice  to  the  dredging.  I  confess  it  freely. 
The  tourist's  Honolulu,  I  suspect,  lies 
wholly  Waikiki  of  the  town — that  being, 
literally,  the  topographical  idiom.  (You 
are  never  told  to  go  north  or  south,  east 
or  west:  you  go  "mauka" — towards  the 
mountains,  or  go  "makai" — towards  the 
[311 


HAWAII: 

sea;  a  shop  lies  on  King  Street  "WaikikI" 
or  "Ewa"  of  Fort  or  Nuuanu.)  The 
city  stretches  some  seven  miles,  end  to 
end,  along  the  sea-front,  running  back, 
up  enchanted  valleys,  to  the  mountains: 
the  Pali,  or  Tantalus.  "Ewa"  of  Hono- 
lulu are  Pearl  Harbor  and  Ewa  planta- 
tion; "Waikiki"  of  it  is — Waikiki.  Here 
are  the  seaside  hotels  and  restaurants, 
the  Outrigger  Club,  Kapiolani  Park,  the 
beach-houses  of  rich  Honolulans,  and 
Diamond  Head.  Here  are  the  bathing, 
the  surf-riding,  the  general  tourist  activity 
— as  well  as  the  amusements  of  Honolulans 
themselves.  Across  from  the  Moana  Hotel 
is  Ainahau,  among  whose  giant  trees  and 
flowers  Stevenson  often  sat  with  the  little 
Kaiulani,  heiress-apparent  to  the  now  long- 
superseded  Queen.  Kaiulani  died  during 
Liliuokalani's  reign,  and  her  father,  Mr. 
Cleghorn,  has  been  dead  these  many  years. 
[32] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

Ainahau  has  been  sold;  but  one  can  still 
lose  oneself  in  those  winding,  overhung 
paths,  the  great  palms  cutting  off  the  sky 
above  one's  head,  and  imagine  the  opera- 
bouffe  days  of  the  monarchy,  half  wishing 
that  strange  chapter  back.  The  portraits 
of  Kaiulani  show  her  as  very  lovely  and  in- 
inevitably  beloved.  She  had,  too,  the 
supreme  wit  to  die  young.  To  a  man  of 
Stevenson's  predilections,  a  beautiful  young 
princess,  half  Polynesian  and  half  Scotch, 
must  have  seemed  one  of  the  choicest 
works  of  God;  and  at  Ainahau,  if  ever,  he 
must  have  been  happy. 

In  all  successful  social  life,  variety  must 
somehow  be  achieved.  In  their  circum- 
scribed space  happy  Honolulans  manage 
it  by  having  several  houses.  Precisely  as 
here,  you  go  to  the  mountains  or  the  sea 
for  recuperation  and  amusement;  only  in 
Hawaii  you  do  not  have  to  go  so  far. 
[33] 


HAWAH: 

Half  an  hour  will  take  you  to  your  bunga- 
low beneath  Diamond  Head;  there  at  Ka- 
hala  you  can  spend  your  Sunday,  bathing 
in  the  multi-colored  ocean.  If  mosquitoes 
bother  you  at  Kahala,  you  can  motor  to 
the  top  of  Tantalus,  where,  at  two  thou- 
sand feet,  you  are  safe  from  them.  Or  you 
may  have  your  beach-house  on  the  wind- 
ward side  of  the  Island,  between  Kahana 
and  Kahuku.  For  a  severer  change,  you 
can  have  a  ranch  on  Kauai  or  Maui.  If  it 
is  absolutely  necessary  for  you  to  shiver — 
and  one  can  conceive  that — ^you  can  visit 
the  volcano  on  Hawaii,  or  take  the  com- 
fortable Kilauea  to  Maui,  and  climb  Ha- 
leakala.  In  the  concrete  rest-house  on 
that  ten-thousand-foot  rim  you  will  need 
all  the  fur  coats  the  family  can  provide. 
It  is  easy  enough  to  change  your  climate 
and  see  a  different  beauty.  Meanwhile 
there  is  bridge,  and  the  tango,  and  polo 
[34] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

at  Moanalua,  and  everything  else  that 
American  civilization  provides  for  one's 
distraction.  Plays  and  operas  are  rare, 
of  course,  though  now  and  then  some 
company  stops  off  between  Austraha  and 
San  Francisco.  The  Islanders,  too,  must 
be  blessedly  free  from  lectures.  Good  golf 
is  provided  at  the  Oahu  Country  Club,  or 
at  Haleiwa.  If  you  are  tired  of  domes- 
ticity, you  can  sit  on  the  floor  in  a  kimono 
at  a  Japanese  tea-house,  while  little  geisha 
girls  bring  you  all  the  things  that  the  yel- 
low man  most  oddly  likes  to  eat,  and  the 
sake  that  he  most  wisely  likes  to  drink. 
You  cannot  skate  or  ski;  but  you  can  go 
riding  or  bathing  or  surf-boating  or  shark- 
fishing  any  time  you  feel  like  it;  and  on 
Hawaii,  they  tell  me,  you  can  put  on  a 
bathing-suit  at  the  end  of  the  day  and 
coast  down  the  dizzy  cane-flumes.  Except 
in  a  Kona  storm  you  are  seldom  housed. 
[35] 


HAWAII: 

Here  the  "unswerving  season"  brings  no 
mitigation  of  beauty.  Some  transplanted 
people  long  at  times  for  snow;  the  true 
Islander,  I  believe,  not  often.  In  any  case, 
the  Canadian  Rockies  are  not  so  much 
farther  from  them  than  from  us — above 
all,  the  journey  is  not  so  much  more  ex- 
pensive. If  you  really  want  to  be  uncom- 
fortably cold,  there  is,  I  am  told,  no  chillier, 
snowier  place  than  Japan  in  winter.  And 
even  Japan  is  only  nine  days  away. 

There  is  scarcely  space  to  tell  of  all 
the  sights  of  Honolulu.  In  the  aquarium 
you  can  see  fish  that  seem  to  have  been 
created  by  French  dressmakers.  They  look 
more  like  audacious  mannequins  at  the 
Longchamps  races  than  citizens  of  the 
simple  ocean — save  that  nature  is  less 
careful  of  color-harmonies  than  Worth 
and  Paquin  are  wont  to  be,  and  that  no 
dressmaker  would  venture  on  a  costume 
[36] 


ffi 


c 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

a  la  squid.  The  aquarium,  I  believe,  had 
this  summer  been  rifled  for  the  Hawaiian 
exhibit  at  the  Panama-Pacific;  but,  even 
so,  it  is  a  smallish  place,  not  comparable 
with  the  chambers  of  wonder  and  horror 
at  Naples. 

Or  you  can  go  out  by  the  Kamehameha 
Schools  to  the  Bishop  Museum — exqui- 
sitely panelled  in  the  beautiful  Hawaiian 
koa  wood,  dusky-gold  and  wildly  grained; 
repository  of  feather-cloaks  and  Polynesian 
antiquities  of  every  sort.  Mrs.  Bishop, 
the  donor,  was  the  daughter  of  Paki,  and 
his  giant  surf-boards  are  nailed  up  in  the 
entrance  porch.  Everywhere  in  Honolulu 
you  find  witnesses  to  a  now  perished  state 
of  society,  when  princesses  of  the  blood 
and  daughters  of  great  chiefs  married  Anglo- 
Saxons.  With  the  passing  of  the  monarchy 
and  the  subsidence  of  the  native  aristoc- 
racy, there  is  less  temptation  to  the  Amer- 
[37] 


HAWAII: 

lean  or  Englishman  to  espouse  a  native, 
and  I  believe  it  is  not  much  done  at  pres- 
ent except  in  the  lower  classes — though  a 
deal  of  the  best  white  blood  is  said  to  have 
received  at  some  time  or  other  a  Polynesian 
tributary.  It  is  natural,  with  the  change 
of  government,  and  all  that  change  entails, 
that  the  fashion  should  have  passed.  Much 
else  has  passed  with  it — the  knowledge 
of  Hawaiian,  for  example.  Every  one 
uses  Hawaiian  words,  but  the  majority 
of  American  children  do  not  learn  the  lan- 
guage. They  are  carefully  not  allowed  to, 
lest  a  chance  Hawaiian  playmate  should 
let  in  a  flood  of  Polynesian  information 
on  their  innocent  minds.  The  Kanaka 
infant  has  "nothing  to  learn";  therefore 
much  too  much  to  teach.  It  is  again, 
in  some  ways,  a  pity,  for  the  Hawaiian 
himself  has  no  interest  in  the  preserva- 
tion of  his  tongue,  and  it  is  degenerat- 
[38] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

ing  into  pidgin-talk.  A  scholar  like  Mr. 
Parker,  for  fifty  years  pastor  of  the  Ka- 
waiahao  church  in  Honolulu,  now  and 
then  a  native  demagogue  who  has  culti- 
vated the  language  for  his  own  purposes — 
these  may  keep  some  interest  in  the  mel- 
lifluous and  moribund  tongue;  but  that  is 
all.  It  has  virtually  ceased  to  be  stuff 
of  rhetoric.  Any  learning  the  Kanaka 
may  acquire  is  won  at  school,  in  English. 
It  is  easy  to  see  the  result.  Beyond  a 
convenient  practical  knowledge — for  it  is 
often,  in  remote  places,  convenient  to 
speak  Hawaiian — almost  no  one  cares  to 
go.  Besides,  it  would  be  more  to  the 
point,  practically,  to  learn  Japanese. 

There  are  other  sights  a-plenty  in  Hono- 
lulu. There  are  the  schools,  from  Puna- 
hou  Academy  down;  there  is  the  Lunalilo 
Home  for  aged  Hawaiians,  which  I  dis- 
tinctly advise  against  visiting,  comforta- 
[39] 


HAWAII: 

ble  though  it  is.  The  Hawaiian  does  not 
grow  old  well — nature's  revenge  for  his 
beauty  in  youth  and  maturity — and  the 
Home  was  to  us  actually  more  depressing 
than  the  Leper  Colony  on  Molokai.  The 
shops  are  not  particularly  interesting: 
Hawaiian  curios  consist  chiefly  of  ukuleles, 
bead  and  shell  necklaces,  and  tapa  cloth 
— which,  I  regret  to  say,  in  this  twilight 
of  the  Hawaiian  day,  is  chiefly  imported 
from  Samoa.  You  can  get  calabashes 
and  lauhala  mats  made  to  order,  but  the 
market  is  not  drugged  with  them.  The 
Hawaiian,  as  I  have  said,  does  not  like 
to  work.  Even  his  jpoi — except  in  coun- 
try districts — is  made  for  him  at  a  Japa- 
nese or  Chinese  2?oz-factory.  There  is 
nothing  "native"  that  you  want  to  take 
home  with  you,  except  the  fruit,  and  even 
if  you  were  naive  enough  to  pack  papayas 
and  mangoes  in  your  steamer-trunk,  a 
[40  1 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

California  official  would  take  them  away 
from  you  before  he  let  you  through  the 
Golden  Gate.  It  seems  that  there  are 
frult-pests  in  the  Eight  Islands:  another 
grievance,  since  all  pests  of  every  sort — 
Including  mosquitoes  and  leprosy — have 
been  brought  thither  from  somewhere  else. 
There  are  as  yet  no  snakes,  but  sometime 
some  one  will  smuggle  In  a  rattler  or  two. 
The  servant  problem  is  made  easy  by 
the  Orient.  The  Japanese  cook  will  do 
everything  In  the  world  besides  cooking: 
he  will  water  your  flowers  and  clean  your 
car,  raise  your  vegetables  and  press  your 
clothes.  If  he  is  married,  his  wife  will 
do  that  part  of  the  work  which  he  least 
likes,  and  between  them  you  will  be  sin- 
gularly comfortable.  Your  children  will 
have  Japanese  nursemaids,  your  yard-boy 
will  be  Japanese  as  well.  You  will  be 
wise  to  choose  a  Portuguese  chauffeur; 
[41] 


HAWAII: 

but  except  for  that  one  service  the  Japs 
will  look  after  you.  It  is  well,  I  am  told, 
to  give  very  positive  orders,  and  to  keep 
to  your  own  regime,  for  the  Jap's  imagi- 
nation is  peculiar  to  his  race,  and  left  to 
himself  he  will  always  do  the  most  ro- 
mantic thing. 

Hear  now  the  confession  of  a  reformed 
Japanophobe.  .  .  .  Before  our  Hawaiian 
experience  I  had  been  quite  convinced 
that  the  Japanese  were  the  Prussians  of 
Asia.  Every  one  knows  how  easy  that 
impression  is  to  get.  I  do  not  pretend 
to  have  arrived  at  it  by  profound  study. 
It  shocked  me  not  a  little,  at  first,  to 
find  Islanders  taking  the  Yellow  Peril 
so  lightly — not  to  say  scofiingly.  They 
seemed  to  me  like  those  folk  who  have 
always  nestled  comfortably  under  Vesu- 
vius. In  another  generation  the  voters 
of  Hawaii  will  be  overwhelmingly  Japa- 
[42  1 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

nese;  for  Japanese  children,  Hawaiian- 
born,  are,  of  course,  American  citizens. 
It  is  interesting,  too,  to  note  that  the 
Japanese  do  not,  like  Chinese,  Portu- 
guese, and  whites,  intermarry  with  other 
races.  They  are  in  the  melting-pot,  but 
they  do  not,  in  that  sense,  melt.  Japa- 
nese children  must  go  to  the  government 
schools  and  learn  English;  but  they  must 
also  go  to  Japanese  schools,  before  and  after 
school  hours,  as  well  as  on  Saturdays  and 
Sundays,  and  be  instructed  in  their  ances- 
tral language,  literature,  and  history.  How 
they  can  work  so  hard,  poor  babies,  and 
still  look  so  gay  and  ephemeral,  is  a  puzzle. 
Perhaps  the  secret  of  it  is  the  kimono — as, 
indeed,  I  suspect  (though  it  is  a  frivolous 
confession)  the  kimono  was  at  the  root  of 
my  own  conversion.  A  Jap  father  in  a 
clean  kimono,  tending  the  baby,  is  the 
most  disarming  sight  in  the  world.  And 
[43] 


HAWAII: 

they  are  always  doing  it,  whether  in  front 
of  their  Honolulu  shops  or  in  their  planta- 
tion villages.  Undoubtedly  they  work, 
and  work  hard,  but  they  are  always  play- 
ing with  the  babies,  first,  last,  and  in  be- 
tween. While  we  saw  them  daily  in  this 
attitude,  I  forgot  the  "Japan  Language 
Schools"  (often  placed,  for  convenience, 
next  the  government-school  building)  and 
the  Shinto  temples  tucked  away  everywhere 
in  the  foliage.  It  is  impossible  to  be  afraid 
of  any  one  who  wears  a  kimono,  and  that 
fact  may  be  either  our  salvation  or  our 
undoing  in  our  relations  with  the  Orient. 
I  do  not  pretend  to  say. 

But  my  conversion  was  not  so  frivolous 
a  matter,  after  all.  The  Japanese  char- 
acter is  apparently  a  very  different  thing 
from  that  which  many  of  us,  at  least,  had 
conceived  it  to  be.  First  of  all,  the  Japa- 
nese is  a  romantic — an  out-and-out,  ab- 
[44] 


from  a  photuj/rapli  coiji/njlit  hij  R   K   Jliimne 

Ape-ape — Poliakumoa  Gulcho 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

surd  romantic.  He  is  very  sure  of  him- 
self; he  will  undertake  to  do  anything 
you  ask  him  to;  he  is  confident  that  he 
can  imitate  anything  that  he  has  seen, 
or  perform  any  act  that  he  has  watched. 
He  is  his  own  publicity  agent,  too — like 
the  braggart  child,  and  as  httle  objection- 
able. (I  have  even  heard,  authentically 
enough,  that  the  famous  Red  Cross  ser- 
vice in  the  Russo-Japanese  War  amounted 
only  to  a  campaign  of  self-praise;  that 
actually  the  Japanese  lost  a  greater  pro- 
portion of  men  through  disease  than  did 
the   Russians.)     He   is   ambitious,    always 

anxious  to  better  himself.     But 

The  Jap  will  build  your  house  for  you 
— ^probably  in  most  cases  he  does;  but  he 
is  as  likely  as  not  to  put  in  your  windows 
upside  down.  Often,  as  soon  as  he  saves 
enough  money  on  the  plantation,  he  drifts 
into  a  Honolulu  commission  merchant's, 
[45] 


HAWAII: 

saying  engagingly:  "This  time  I  make 
store."  He  pays  down  his  savings,  gets 
additional  credit,  and  proceeds  to  "make 
store."  But  he  is  apt,  in  a  year  or  two, 
to  go  bankrupt.  He  is  so  enamoured  of 
his  idea  that  he  would  rather  sell  every- 
thing in  his  shop  on  credit  than  to  sell  for 
cash  and  have  any  goods  left  on  his  shelves. 
Or  he  will  be  a  chauffeur;  but  the  god  of 
speed  also  is  in  his  Pantheon,  and  he  will 
break  his  or  your  neck  with  the  most  de- 
voted abandon.  It  is  terrifying  to  meet  a 
car-load  of  Japs  in  a  narrow  place.  It  is 
even  more  terrifying  to  be  driven  by  a 
Jap,  yourself,  round  a  mountain  road  with 
a  j)ali  on  your  left  and  the  sea  five  hundred 
feet  below  on  your  right.  At  the  steepest 
point  the  Jap  is  sure  to  turn  and  tell  you 
that  this  is  a  very  dangerous  place — not 
relaxing,  meanwhile,  his  speed.  If  you  are 
not  impressed  (though,  for  many  reasons, 
[46] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

you  probably  are)  he  will,  very  likely,  add 
a  dramatic  account  of  how,  not  long  ago, 
he  was  attacked  at  this  very  spot,  by  a 
band  of  Filipino  marauders,  all  armed; 
how,  fortunately,  he  had  no  money  (you 
begin  here  to  be  grateful  for  your  express 
cheques);  how,  finally,  by  dint  of  cool- 
ness, courage,  and  speed,  he  got  away. 
Even  in  his  pidgin-English  he  makes  lit- 
erature of  it — until  he  becomes  positively 
too  excited  by  his  own  romance  to  pro- 
ceed. It  is  like  listening  to  the  wild 
Odysseys  of  your  own  small  boy.  Luck- 
ily, the  Jap  likes  to  toot  his  horn:  it  is 
your  only  safeguard.  Return  over  the 
same  ground  a  few  days  later  with  a 
cautious  Portuguese  driver,  and  you  will 
feel  infinitely  safer — but  you  will  find  your- 
self missing  something. 

The  Japanese,  in  spite  of  their  romance, 
are    law-abiding    folk — another    disarming 
[471 


HAWAII: 

fact.  The  Filipino  is  the  bad  boy  of  the 
Islands:  he  will  loot,  and  kill  for  loot — 
for  an  astonishingly  small  amount  of  loot. 
He  kills  very  brutally,  too.  Occasionally, 
in  the  day's  work,  the  Japanese  will  slay 
— but  seldom;  and  when  he  does,  I  have 
heard,  it  is  apt  to  be  a  case  of  jealousy — 
a  crime  passionel. 

It  must,  of  course,  be  remembered  that 
in  Hawaii  one  deals  largely  with  a  Japa- 
nese type  very  different  from  that  which 
we  encounter  here;  not  the  student  or  the 
merchant,  but  the  laborer,  the  coolie. 
There  are  merchants,  and  there  are  edu- 
cated Japanese  of  the  better  classes:  priests, 
teachers,  editors  of  papers,  and  so  on. 
There  is  even  the  distinguished  artist  who 
will  *'do"  your  Japanese  garden,  or  build 
your  room  for  the  tea  ceremony,  but  who 
will  not  do  either  unless  he  has  all  the  time 
he  wants  and  absolute  liberty  to  follow 
[48] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

his  tradition  to  the  least  detail  of  ma- 
terial and  form.  But  these  are  few  in  com- 
parison. The  Japanese  have  been  imported 
chiefly  to  work  with  their  hands,  and  the 
bulk  of  them  are  the  common  people. 
The  women  work  on  the  plantations  as 
well  as  the  men,  wearing  a  special  dress: 
an  odd  series  of  dark  garments,  puttee- 
like leg-gear,  huge  flat  hats  tilted  on  their 
chignons  at  an  angle  of  forty-five  degrees, 
a  white  cloth  hanging  down  beneath  to 
protect  the  neck  from  the  sun.  A  kama- 
aina  can  tell  at  once  the  nationality  and 
the  breed  of  any  individual  whom  he  passes; 
but,  though  I  am  seldom  at  a  loss  to  dis- 
tinguish Chinese  from  Japanese  in  Amer- 
ica, in  Hawaii  I  found  it  as  impossible 
as  a  task  in  a  fairy-tale.  The  Japanese 
coolie  is  very  like  the  Chinese  coolie;  and 
in  country  districts  there  are  the  Koreans 
to  confuse  one.  The  women  are  easier 
[49] 


HAWAII: 

to  distinguish  than  the  men,  on  account 
of  their  dress — the  Chinese  trousers,  the 
vast  FiHpino  sleeves,  are  as  unmistakable 
as  the  kimono.  But  the  men  in  the  cane- 
fields  dress  as  is  most  convenient  and,  un- 
til they  have  gone  home  and  changed,  it 
is  not  always  easy  to  know.  There  are, 
besides,  infinite  complications  of  race-mix- 
ture; and,  while  we  thought  it  easy  to 
recognize  a  pure  Hawaiian,  the  malihini 
could  never  be  sure  of  the  part-Hawaiian 
— whether  he  was  part  Portuguese,  part 
white,  or  part  Chinese.  It  was  like  a 
child's  game  to  drive  along  a  country  road 
and  ask:  "This  one.'^  This  one.'*  This 
one.f*"  The  kamaainas  could  always  label 
them.  At  the  end  of  the  day  it  was  easier 
for  the  malihini  to  guess;  for  the  Jap  in 
his  kimono  is  different  from  every  one  else 
in  the  world. 

On  the  whole,  it  is  easy  to  see  why  the 
[50] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

Islanders  discount  the  Japanese  peril.  We 
heard  one  or  two  men  of  sense  and  long 
experience  dissent  from  the  common  opin- 
ion, but  not  more  than  that.  Only  one  or 
two  were  willing  to  admit  that  there  might, 
in  the  next  generation,  be  trouble.  Most 
Americans  in  Hawaii  have  faith  in  the 
melting-pot;  they  think  the  Jap  soluble. 
This,  though  they  confess  that  Japan  did 
want  the  Islands,  and  would  still  exceed- 
ingly like  to  possess  them.  When  we 
quoted  to  them  fears  that  we  had  heard 
expressed  at  home,  they  usually  said,  in 
sum:  You  won't  jQnd  any  one  here  outside 
of  the  army  who  believes  that  alarmist 
stuff;  of  course,  the  army  is  always  look- 
ing for  trouble.  Certainly,  the  daily  reve- 
lation of  the  Japanese  temperament  is  al- 
laying to  fears.  Whether  Americans  in 
Hawaii  are  misreading  that  temperament  or 
not  is  in  the  womb  of  fate.  But  the  Is- 
[51] 


HAWAII: 

lander,  at  least,  has  a  better  chance  to  esti- 
mate the  Japanese  situation — ^psychological, 
economic,  political — than  we  on  the  main- 
land. It  may  be  that  the  Mikado  sends 
out  thousands  of  Japanese  laborers  with 
strict  instructions  to  provide  a  spectacle 
of  romantic  inefficiency  for  the  deluded 
American.  It  may  be  that  wearing  white 
kimonos  and  petting  the  babies  are  both 
done  by  imperial  order.  Perhaps  the  tale 
of  overcrowded  Japan  is  as  false  as  the 
tale  of  overcrowded  Germany;  perhaps, 
really,  the  Japanese,  like  the  Germans, 
have  to  import  labor  from  without.  The 
cane-cutting  may  all  be  a  blind.  If  they 
are  the  Prussians  of  Asia,  that  is  plausible. 
Bujt  in  that  case  the  Prussians  of  Asia  do 
their  deceiving  much  better  than  the  Prus- 
sians of  Europe. 

The   Chinaman   in   Hawaii  is   very  like 
himself    anywhere.     Every    village,    even 
[52] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

the  smallest,  has  its  pake  (Chinese)  store. 
Often  the  pake  storekeeper  has  a  Ha- 
waiian wife.  The  Chinaman  has,  as  we 
all  know,  a  great  gift  for  business;  he 
is  prudent,  industrious,  and  honest.  No 
one  has  ever  paid  him  the  doubtful  com- 
pliment of  fancying  that  there  was  a 
"Chinese  problem."  The  Chinese  virtues 
are  too  well  known  for  mention  here; 
though  it  may  be  remarked  in  passing 
that  the  Chinese-Hawaiian  blend  is  said 
to  be  the  best  for  character  (as  it  is,  by 
and  large,  for  physique)  of  all  those  to 
which  the  Hawaiians  treat  themselves. 
The  Chinaman,  ploughing  his  rice-fields 
with  the  classic  water-buffalo,  sitting  de- 
corously in  his  tidy  shop,  or  selling  un- 
speakable foods  in  his  markets,  lends  a 
grave  and  welcome  note  to  the  medley. 
There  is  experience  back  of  the  Chinese 
face,  male  or  female;  it  is  uralt;  it  has 
[53] 


HAWAII: 

psychology  in  it;  you  feel  that  it  would 
respond  to  a  human  problem.  The  flitting 
Japanese  seem  ephemeral  creatures  in  com- 
parison: artistic  by  blessed  instinct,  but 
not  pre-eminently  intellectual.  Even  when 
a  Chinaman  gets  drunk,  he  does  it  with 
a  difference.  But  that  is  for  another  and 
more  exotic  chapter.  .  .  . 

In  Honolulu  we  often  ended  up  the 
evening  by  motoring  to  the  Pali.  Why, 
I  do  not  know;  for  in  the  darkness  that 
view,  which  seems  to  gather  into  its  lav- 
ish bounds  half  the  history  and  half  the 
beauty  of  Hawaii,  does  not  exist.  You 
peer  over  the  great  parapet,  down  the 
seven-hundred-foot  drop,  and  see  nothing 
but  the  glow-worm  lights  of  Kaneohe,  far 
beneath  you  and  beyond,  near  the  illim- 
itable sea.  You  cannot  hear  the  surf; 
you  cannot  see  the  fern-stippled  rock,  or 
the  pineapple  plantations  that  tint  wind- 
[54] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

ward  Oahu  with  an  ineffable  green.  Only 
the  wind  rushes  through  this  narrow  cleft 
in  the  volcanic  mountain  chain  and  nearly 
oversets  you.  It  is  like  a  heavy  scarf 
across  your  eyelids;  your  lips  can  scarce 
move  against  it;  and  you  cling  to  any 
friend  that  is  near.  A  hundred  yards 
away  there  was  not  a  breath,  will  not 
be  when  you  return.  But  here,  if  you 
want  to  climb  a  few  feet  to  the  Kame- 
hameha  tablet  set  in  the  side  of  the  cliff, 
you  will  be  glad  of  the  little  railing  to 
clutch.  Except  for  that,  you  might  be 
lifted  and  blown  across  the  parapet,  down 
the  cHff  over  which  Kamehameha  the 
Great  once  drove  an  army.  The  view 
from  the  Pali  is  ever  various — morning 
and  afternoon,  mist  and  sun  tell  different 
tales  of  it.  But  it  is  always  significant: 
all  the  violent  volcanic  beauty  of  Hawaii, 
together  with  its  tropic  softness,  is  mea- 
[551 


HAWAII: 

sured  there  lavishly  for  you.  Kameha- 
meha  has  stamped  his  legend  on  the  cliff 
where  your  feet  are  set;  the  multi-colored 
ocean,  beyond  the  coral-gardens  of  Ka- 
neohe,  spreads  out  its  lonely  leagues  be- 
fore you;  the  wind  itself  that  sweeps  dis- 
dainfully over,  past,  and  through  you,  is 
overdue  for  the  Equator  and  the  sinister 
low  archipelagoes  of  the  South.  Some 
sense  of  this  was  always  heavy  upon  us  as 
we  breasted  that  expanse.  Even  at  night 
the  lights  of  Kaneohe  seemed  to  hint  it 
all.  Every  tourist,  in  his  few  hours'  stop- 
over, can  drive  to  the  Pali;  and  of  that 
one  is  glad.  For  the  Pali  is  more  essential 
than  Waikiki  or  Diamond  Head  or  Pearl 
Harbor.  Its  memories  are  pre-Territorial, 
and  its  inclusive  beauty  is  as  poignant  and 
inimitable  as  the  Hawaiian  voice  lifted  in 
Polynesian  song. 

Returning,  you  wind  through  dim  jun- 
[56] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

gles  of  ^azz-trees  that  no  army,  it  seems, 
could  cut  or  blast  away,  until  you  reach 
the  Country  Club  and  Nuuanu  Avenue, 
and  then  Honolulu  town  and  harbor. 
The  wind,  free  of  the  rock  wall  and  ap- 
peased, follows  you  down  to  the  ships. 
Six  miles  from  the  cleft  in  the  Pah  the  lei 
women  sit  on  Hotel  Street  (as  per  post- 
card) and  sell  their  wreaths.  If  you  are 
a  departing  traveller — and  sooner  or  later, 
alas !  you  must  be — your  friends  stock 
themselves  heavily.  You  are  bowed  down 
with  weight  of  flowers  as  you  steam  away 
from  Honolulu.  Very  likely  your  heart  is 
heavy,  too.  Sooner  than  you  would  wish, 
the  long,  parti-colored  streamers  that  you 
have  flung  to  your  friends  on  the  dock 
break  and  fall  away  into  the  ocean.  The 
fragile  rainbow  bond  is  severed;  the  last 
boy  dives,  Kanaka-fashion,  standing  erect, 
from  the  top  of  a  life-boat;  and  you  take 
[57] 


HAWAII:  SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

up  the  trail  again.  But,  whichever  way 
one  sails,  the  keenest  visual  memory  is  of 
the  Pacific  seen  from  a  volcanic  height: 
the  view  from  the  Pali  windward,  half  a 
world  away  to  the  frozen  North;  for  us, 
ever  the  view  southward  across  the  town, 
the  harbor,  the  reef,  and  the  blazing  ocean, 
from  the  happy  heights  of  Alewa. 


[58] 


BY-WAYS  m  HAWAII 


BY-WAYS  IN  HAWAII 

WE  were  always  weaving  a  shuttle's 
path  back  and  forth  from  Hono- 
lulu to  other  islands,  ports,  and 
places.  Indeed,  it  was  outside  Honolulu 
that  our  most  exotic  adventures  came  to 
us.  There  can  be  no  coherence  in  the  tale 
of  them,  for  our  most  careful  plans  were 
sometimes  frustrated,  and  the  best  things 
often  came  to  us  by  mere  brute  luck. 
Moreover,  it  is  a  traveller's  platitude  that 
you  never  can  tell  beforehand,  or  take 
another  person's  word:  it  is  not  always 
the  star  in  Baedeker  that  guides  you  to  the 
hallowed  spot.  So  it  was,  as  ever,  in  Ha- 
waii.   Follows  the  disconnected  tale: 

I  had  had,  privately,  a  prejudice  against 
Kilauea;   why,  I  do  not  know.    There  is  a 
great  choice  in  the  works  of  God;    and  I 
[61] 


HAWAII: 

was  not  at  all  sure  that  I  should  rejoice  in 
the  volcano.  It  is  a  nasty  sail  from  Hono- 
lulu to  Hilo  on  Hawaii;  besides,  there 
were  a  vast  number  of  tourists  profiting 
by  the  Matsonia's  trip  to  go.  It  is  the 
conventional  thing  to  take,  for  this  pur- 
pose, three  days  out  of  a  week's  stay. 
But  all  arrangements  had  been  delight- 
fully and  inexorably  made  for  us;  and  we 
had  scarcely  been  two  days  in  Honolulu 
before  we  packed  our  suitcases  for  Hawaii. 
It  is  better  to  go  to  Hilo  than  to  come 
away  from  it — in  every  sense.  The  worst 
part  of  the  trip,  then,  comes  when  you 
are  safe  in  your  berth;  during  the  first 
hours  you  are  usually  under  the  lee  of 
some  island.  It  is  better,  too,  to  travel 
in  an  ocean-going  steamer  than  in  an 
inter-island  boat,  for  the  bigger  steamer 
makes  lighter  work  of  the  choppy  inter- 
island  channels.  I  may  candidly  say  that 
[62] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

the  run  from  Honolulu  to  Hilo  on  the 
Matsonia  was  the  only  poetic  experience 
I  have  ever  had  at  sea:  a  full  moon,  a 
quiet  ocean,  and  the  shifting  panorama 
of  the  six  islands  (for  Kauai  and  Niihau 
lie  off  in  the  other  direction,  to  the  north- 
west) as  you  thread  your  way  among 
them.  Scarcely  have  you  dropped  Koko 
Head  in  the  sunset  before  you  lift  the  low- 
lying  barrenness  of  westward  Molokai, 
brown -glimmering  under  the  moon.  One 
light  midway  of  the  island  shows  you 
Kaunakakai;  and  a  scant  ten  miles  across 
from  there  the  tragic  promontory  points 
a  frail  ^v^edge  into  the  foaming  Pacific. 
Later  we  visited  windward  Molokai,  and 
trod  the  grassy  "streets"  of  Kalaupapa, 
all  in  the  celestial  light  of  an  August 
morning;  but  at  that  time  we  did  not 
know  whether  we  should  ever  be  nearer 
to  the  scene  of  Damien's  martyrdom  than 
[63] 


HAWAII: 

we  were  in  the  July  moonlight,  slipping 
past  Kaunakakai.  It  seemed  a  very  mir- 
acle to  be  only  a  dozen  miles  away,  as 
the  crow  flies,  from  that  lone  settlement 
of  shuddering  connotation.  There  was 
dancing  on  the  deck,  under  the  bright 
lamps;  and  no  one  besides  ourselves,  I 
dare  say,  was  thinking  of  Kalaupapa. 
Neither  kamaaina  nor  malihini  is  supposed 
to  think  of  it;  it  is  excessively  bad  form, 
in  Hawaii,  to  think  of  it.  Lanai  soon  ap- 
peared to  starboard,  virtually  lightless;  and 
then  for  a  long  time  we  were  under  the  lee 
of  Maui,  the  bright  lights  of  Lahaina  hav- 
ing beckoned  us  in  vain.  Little  Molokini 
one  could  almost  have  swung  oneself  into 
from  the  deck-rail.  It  is  the  mere  tip  of 
a  crater,  lifting  its  hollowed  summit  above 
the  waves,  looking  more  like  a  tiny  atoll 
than  anything  volcanic.  We  passed  be- 
tween  it  and  Kahoolawe — an  island  about 
[64  1 


M 


W 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

sixty-nine  square  miles  in  extent,  hu- 
manly inhabited  at  the  present  time  by  one 
old  Jap,  who  seems  to  be  the  only  person 
capable  of  enduring  that  solitude  with- 
out going  mad.  Just  why  Kahoolawe  has 
to  have  a  caretaker  I  do  not  know,  but 
apparently  it  does;  and  that  is  Kahoola- 
we's  distinction.  Finally,  even  East  Maui 
dropped  to  stern;  we  were  in  the  Hawaii 
channel,  and  it  was  past  midnight.  The 
dancing  had  stopped;  the  ukuleles  were 
dumb;  those  people  who  had  insisted  on 
seeing  the  Southern  Cross  had  got  it 
pointed  out  to  them,  in  spite  of  the  fact 
that  it  was  not  there;  and  every  one — we 
last  of  all — went  to  bed.  Early  in  the 
morning  we  were  off  Hilo,  beside  the  rust- 
ing bulk  of  an  interned  German  tramp, 
and  a  sophisticated  motor-launch  was  tak- 
ing people  off  in  relays. 

Every  one  was  hotfoot  for  the  volcano, 
[65  1 


HAWAII: 

and  there  were  hardly  motor-cars  enough 
to  go  round.  We  waited  a  Httle  in  Hilo 
for  ours  to  return  from  the  Volcano  House 
— thirty-six  miles  away.  Meanwhile,  in 
another  car,  with  a  Japanese  chauffeur, 
we  sought  out  some  of  the  natural  won- 
ders of  the  immediate  vicinity.  It  was  a 
wild  and  fruitless  morning;  unreal  and 
scarce  in  retrospect  to  be  believed  in.  I 
feel  sure  that  we  have  seen  Rainbow  Falls 
and  the  Boiling  Pots;  for  I  know  inti- 
mately now,  for  all  time,  the  stifling  heat 
of  the  path  through  the  sugar-cane.  There 
is  nothing  hotter  in  the  world  than  that 
sweating  shade,  with  the  cane  clipping 
you  on  either  side;  a  calidarium  with  al- 
ways a  possible  scorpion  or  centipede  under 
foot.  A  narrow  trail  through  high  cane 
seems  to  lie  straight  along  the  Equator. 
You  are  glad  to  emerge  again  into  the  cool- 
ness of  the  noonday  sun. 
[66] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

Apparently  we  could  not  let  well  enough 
alone;  for  we  went  on,  by  an  abominably 
muddy  road,  to  a  down-at-heel  sugar  vil- 
lage. Our  Jap  was  confident,  of  course — 
so  confident  that  he  turned  the  big  car  in 
a  slough  at  the  end  of  a  frowzy  lane,  and 
ran  the  hind  wheels  down  a  lush  bank 
above  a  stream.  Only  some  six  miles  out  of 
Hilo,  we  were  at  the  world's  end.  Twenty 
feet  above  us  a  Filipino  flume-tender  waved 
a  condescending  hand,  signalling  that  he 
could  not  leave  his  flume.  Women  and 
children  peeped  out  of  knot-hole  windows 
in  their  very  dirty  barracks;  but  neither 
their  shock  heads  nor  their  shyness  could 
help  us.  Moreover,  among  Americans, 
Filipinos,  and  one  ardent  Jap,  there  was 
very  little  Hawaiian  to  be  collected,  and 
Hawaiian  would  have  been  the  only  chance 
of  a  common  tongue.  A  great  deal  of 
gesturing  and  shouting  on  the  part  of  the 
[67] 


HAWAII: 

Olympian  flume-tender  brought  out  some 
straggling  male  Filipinos.  They  changed 
their  rags  for  worse  rags — any  eye  could 
see  that  it  was  going  to  be  a  dirty  job — 
fetched  stones  from  the  stream  and  wooden 
joists  from  heaven  knows  where,  and  set 
to  work.  The  flume-tender  bossed  from 
his  height  until  he  could  bear  it  no  more; 
then  descended,  leaving  the  cane  to  pile 
up,  if  it  liked,  at  the  curve  of  the  flume. 
But  nothing  availed.  The  wheels  would 
whir,  then  sink  back.  Suddenly  a  cheer 
went  up  for  a  new  arrival — a  Chinaman 
appeared  in  the  frowzy  lane  driving  a 
Ford.  Another  language  was  added  to  the 
confusion;  but  our  chauffeur  proudly  pro- 
duced a  rope,  and  the  Chinaman,  being — 
he,  too — a  motorist,  understood.  We  waited 
confidently  for  the  Ford  to  pull  the  car 
out  of  the  mud.  But  we  had  not  reckoned 
with  Japanese  optimism.  The  Ford  did  its 
[68] 


From  a  phutugraph  by  R.  (('.  Perkins. 

Cane  flume  on  Hawaii. 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

best,  but  the  chauffeur's  rope  was  rotten 
and  broke  in  the  middle.  More  FiHpinos 
arrived;  a  few  children  ventured  out  of 
the  slummy  barracks  to  stare;  the  flume- 
tender  clean  forgot  his  flume;  Oriental 
eloquence  thickened  the  air;  and  at  last, 
by  some  superhuman  heaving  of  brown 
breasts  and  shoulders,  the  trick  was  done. 
Our  car  was  once  more  safe  in  the  lane. 
The  Chinaman,  in  his  Ford,  disappeared 
somewhere,  gracious,  imperturbable,  and 
superior  to  the  end,  making  us  feel  as  if 
we  had  somehow  undergone  a  diplomatic 
defeat  at  the  hands  of  Yiian  Shih-K'ai. 
Our  Japanese  chauffeur  seemed  our  inef- 
fectual brother-in-blood.  Money  was  dis- 
tributed; there  was  long  cheering;  and  the 
flume-tender  reappeared  on  his  perch  as  if 
he  had  never  condescended  to  leave  it. 

We  had  the  unplanned-for  luck  to  stay 
four  days  in  and  about  Hilo;    and  Hilo 
[69] 


HAWAII: 

was  to  me  the  supreme  experience  on 
Hawaii.  After  all  our  wanderings  my 
heart  is  still  there.  I  think  I  know  the 
reason,  though  our  beloved  kamaainas 
could  not  understand  it.  Hilo,  it  should 
be  admitted,  has  nearly  the  highest  rain- 
fall in  the  world,  and  that  is  enough  to 
damn  it  in  the  eyes  of  those  who  live 
where  they  appear  to  control  the  weather, 
so  admirably  adapted  to  life  it  is.  They 
also  consider  Hilo  hot;  but  of  course  these 
tropic  folk  know  nothing  about  heat. 
They  are  used  to  perfection  in  the  way 
of  climate,  and  they  are  ignorant  of  the 
rigors  of  the  temperate  zone.  It  rained  in 
Hilo  while  we  were  there,  but  not  exces- 
sively— just  enough  to  give  us  an  excuse, 
now  and  then,  for  sitting  on  our  porch  and 
watching  the  ladies  of  Hilo  fend  off  the 
rain  with  paper  umbrellas.  Either  from 
the  mountains  or  the  sea  there  is  nearly 
[70] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

always  a  breeze;  except  for  one  night  (in 
their  hottest  season)  we  slept  under  blan- 
kets. 

My  own  reason  for  loving  Hilo  was 
something  deeper  than  this,  however.  It 
seemed  to  be  a  distinguished  port  of  that 
imaginary  hemisphere  which  has  come  to 
outweigh  the  other  in  charm.  Imaginary, 
because  it  corresponds  to  nothing  on  the 
charts;  indeed  is  not,  strictly  speaking,  a 
hemisphere  at  all.  It  includes  all  of  Af- 
rica except  Egypt,  all  of  the  South  Seas, 
and  most  of  Asia  east  of  Bombay.  The 
Indian  Ocean  and  the  South  Pacific  wash 
its  shores.  It  excludes  Europe,  the  two 
Americas,  and  everything  north  of  the 
fortieth  parallel.  It  is  not  even  wholly 
"east  of  Suez."  Various  tropic  seas,  like 
the  Caribbean,  do  not  belong  to  it.  You 
can  see  that  that  is  not  really  a  hemi- 
sphere; and  that  it  has  no  more  ethno- 
[71] 


HAWAII: 

graphic  than  geographic  coherence.  Soe- 
rabaya,  Singapore,  Raratonga,  Dakar, 
Tunis,  Antananarivo,  Hong-Kong,  and 
Sydney  are  all  important  places  therein. 
Many  people  have  sung  of  it,  but  Conrad 
is  its  laureate.  I  recognized  immediately 
that  I  loved  Hilo  because  Hilo  was  un- 
questionably of  it.  So,  too,  are  other  places 
in  the  Islands;  but  the  hotel  at  Hilo  gives 
the  last  authentic  touch.  If  *'Marlow"  is 
ever  fortunate  enough  to  stay  there,  he 
will  linger  until,  gazing  at  the  big  caout- 
chouc in  the  garden,  he  has  told  us  some 
five  hundred  pages  of  vivid  history.  Ever 
and  anon  I  looked  for  the  dim  light  of  his 
cigar. 

Hilo  is  a  quiet  town:  there  are  no 
trolley-cars  as  yet,  and  the  dampness  of 
the  climate  makes  you  see  and  hear  every- 
thing through  a  gorgeous  mist  of  tropical 
vegetation.  Here  are  the  most  enormous 
[72] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

poincianas  and  monkey-pods,  the  thick- 
est forests  of  breadfruit  and  bananas,  and 
here  the  palms  shoulder  highest  into  the 
sky.  In  the  court-house  grounds  at  Hilo 
the  royal  and  coco-palms  stand  side  by 
side  like  wedded  creatures,  male  and  fe- 
male of  a  stately  genus;  the  royal  palm 
topping  perceptibly — in  some  neck-cran- 
ing, vertical  distance — his  spouse.  Hilo 
is  girt  about  by  sounds  of  flowing  water; 
and  even  when  the  sun  is  brightest,  the 
clouds  are  impenetrable  round  the  fourteen- 
thousand-foot  summit  of  Mauna  Kea.  You 
can  stand,  in  mid-Hilo,  on  one  of  the 
bridges  over  the  Wailuku  River  and  watch 
the  native  children  dive,  feet  first,  into 
the  pool,  their  long  hair  standing  horizon- 
tally off  their  heads.  We  stopped  to  watch, 
one  brilliant  morning,  and  they,  perceiv- 
ing us,  came  farther  down  the  gorge  to 
dive  where  the  liaoles — the  white  folk — 
[73] 


HAWAII: 

could  see  them  better.  They  were  inacces- 
sible to  us,  unless  we  had  walked  a  half- 
mile  round  to  the  top  of  the  gorge;  we 
could  not  so  much  as  throw  a  coin  to  them. 
They  moved  out  of  the  background  into 
the  middle  distance  for  sheer  amiability 
and  tact.  One  boy  sat  at  the  top  of  the 
fall  and  coasted  down  the  serpentine  rock- 
flume  with  the  impetuous  torrent — feet 
out,  at  his  ease,  letting  the  sinuous  rush 
of  water  bear  him  up  on  its  solid  wave. 
Over  and  over  he  did  it,  with  the  regular- 
ity and  grace  of  a  natural  phenomenon; 
each  time  reappearing  out  of  the  deep 
pool  into  which  he  had  been  flung,  to 
clamber  up  the  wall  of  the  gorge — e  da 
capo.  Why  he  was  not  cut  to  pieces  on 
the  rocks  only  the  Kanaka  and  his  water- 
gods  know. 

How  we  lost  ourselves  happily  in  tiny 
Hilo,  emerging  ever  upon  the  ocean;   how 
[74  1 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

we  watched  the  fishermen  send  their  great 
nets,  in  one  masterly  throw,  to  settle  in  a 
huge,  perfect  circle  on  the  water;  how  we 
nearly,  in  a  briny  little  shop,  bought  a 
yellow  fisherman's  coat,  simply  because  I 
would  rather  buy  something  I  do  not  want 
from  a  Chinaman  than  something  I  do 
from  any  one  else;  how  we  learned  to  know 
the  fringy  palm-silhouette  of  Cocoanut  Is- 
land authentically  from  any  angle — these 
memories  must  not  be  dwelt  on,  diary- 
fashion.  Much  as  we  should  have  liked  to 
dwell  in  Hilo  forever,  fed  with  strange 
fruits,  sung  to  sleep  by  strange  trees,  and 
ministered  to  by  Japanese  boys  whose 
smiles  implied  that  we  were  samurai,  we 
could  not  do  it.  We  were  always,  in  those 
few  days,  leaving  it  for  some  hinterland 
and  coming  back  to  our  cottage-porch  for 
perfect  refreshment.  Always  there  was 
the  sense  of  being  at  the  heart  of  a  Con- 
[75] 


HAWAII: 

rad  novel;  only,  as  in  Conrad,  those  name- 
less, white-clad  gentlemen-adventurers,  and 
those  beautiful,  inarticulate  natives  were 
living  in  a  drama  to  which  the  mere  trav- 
eller had  no  clue.  In  the  next  street, 
with  its  madly  mixed  population,  anything 
might  be  happening;  a  few  miles  back  of 
us,  in  the  tropical  forest,  the  great  tree- 
ferns  might  be  making  a  living  sanctuary 
for  the  indiscreet.  Incredible  that  there 
should  not  be  there,  under  our  hands,  the 
stuff  of  Victory  or  Falk!  But  we  were  the 
faithful  Rechabites:   we  could  not  stay. 

Of  the  volcano  of  Kilauea  who  shall 
speak  ?  Approach  it  as  cynically  as  you 
like,  you  will  be  startled  from  your  in- 
difference. It  will  be  strange  if  you  do 
not  feel,  looking  down  into  that  pit,  many 
comfortable  veils  stripped  off  your  swathed 
mind.  A  naked  human  emotion  is  a  great 
and  terrible  thing  to  encounter;  some- 
176] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

times  a  thing  to  turn  one's  face  from.  But 
this  is  even  more  appaUing.  You  may 
clutch,  first-off,  at  the  easy  metaphor  of 
hell.  Kilauea  is  not  like  hell — it  is  worse. 
Worse,  because  there  is  no  moral  signifi- 
cance in  it,  to  knit  our  souls  to  such  a 
spectacle.  Dante's  eighth  circle,  with  its 
barattieri  sunk  in  boiling  pitch,  was  part  of 
a  mighty  plan;  a  physical  result  of  moral 
facts;  comprehensible,  its  very  hideous- 
ness  dependent  on  the  historic  threescore- 
years-and-ten  of  mortal  life.  You  can  avoid 
hell  by  being  good;  and  even  if  you  de- 
scend into  it,  you  will  have  human  com- 
pany. But  this  has  nothing  to  do  with 
vice  or  virtue;  it  makes  naught  of  moral 
values.  You  squat  on  that  rim  and  stare 
seven  hundred  feet  down  into  Halemaumau 
— the  inner  pit  of  Kilauea — and  history  is 
superseded.  The  sulphur  stench  blows  up 
now  and  then  like  a  great  wave  and  drives 
[77  1 


HAWAII: 

you  gasping  from  the  brink.  You  wander 
about  the  lava-bed  for  a  little  (you  could 
wander  on  that  same  lava-bed  for  miles, 
if  you  chose)  and  then  return.  The  simple 
fact  of  Halemaumau  is  a  pit,  some  twenty 
acres  in  extent,  that  seethes  and  boils  in- 
cessantly. Every  few  moments  an  acre  of 
solid  lava  rises  up  out  of  the  caldron,  is 
sucked  back  into  the  scarlet  waves,  and 
molten  again  before  your  eyes.  In  another 
corner  of  the  pit  a  fiery  fountain  bursts 
like  a  great  geyser.  The  worst  of  it  is  that 
you  can  hear  it:  the  pot  seethes  and  boils 
and  groans  in  your  very  ears,  for  all  the 
seven  hundred  feet  between  you  and  it. 
And  if  you  cared  to  make  a  misstep,  you 
could  bound,  from  little  ledge  to  little 
ledge,  straight  into  the  mutter  and  flame 
of  it.  I  leave  you  to  imagine  the  spec- 
tacle of  Kilauea  when  the  sudden  tropic 
night  has  fallen  on  the  vast  crater  of  which 
[78] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

Halemaumau  is  only  the  deepest  pocket. 
The  vague  geologic  visions  of  the  layman 
do  not  lag  behind.  This  goes  on,  one  re- 
flects, beneath  us,  to  the  very  core  of  the 
planet;  and  the  end  of  it  is  mere  dying 
like  the  moon.  Yes,  geology  is  worse 
than  theology.  .  .  .  "Are  you  going  to 
write  us  a  little  story  about  the  volcano?" 
a  cheerful  reporter  telephoned  to  ask, 
after  we  had  returned  to  Honolulu;  and 
when  I  refused,  the  only  reward  of  my 
decency  was  a  head-line:  *'Mrs.  Gerould 
Refuses  to  Boom  Volcano."  It  still  shocks 
me  a  little  to  think  of  booming  Kilauea; 
but  I  will  indorse  anything  the  Promotion 
Committee  cares  to  say  about  it. 

We  wanted,  not  strangely,  to  see  Ha- 
waiian life  in  some  remote  and  untouched 
corner,    and    the    kamaainas    sent    us   to 
Kalapana.      A    chauffeur   was   chosen   for 
[79] 


HAWAII: 

us  (an  Island-born  Norwegian)  who  could 
speak  Hawaiian,  and  we  were  recom- 
mended to  him  as  malihinis.  It  is  a 
longish  run  through  the  forest  of  ohia  and 
koa  and  wild  banana  and  tree-fern.  We 
took  luncheon  with  us,  but  supplemented 
it  with  fresh  mangoes  from  the  pake  store 
in  Pahoa.  Just  outside  Pahoa  we  passed 
by  the  lumber-mill,  skirting  great  heaps 
of  ohia  ties  for  the  Santa  Fe  Railway. 
Then  we  broke  definitely  with  civiliza- 
tion. In  mid-forest  we  stopped  to  eat, 
leaving  room  at  the  side  of  the  road  for 
the  scant  Sunday  traffic  to  pass  us.  Odd 
traffic  indeed;  for  what  tourist  goes  to 
Kaimu  or  Kalapana.^^  Hawaiians  (with 
a  Portuguese  strain  .f^)  on  donkeys,  wear- 
ing sombreros  and  looking  for  all  the 
world  like  kindly  Mexicans  (if  there  be 
any  kindly  Mexicans !) — sitting,  guitar  on 
hip,  and  smiling  broadly  as  the  little 
[80  1 


SCENES  AND   IMPRESSIONS 

cavalcade  piled  up  in  the  narrow  defile, 
which  was  all  our  huge  car  left  of  the 
right  of  way;  a  Chinaman,  weighed  down 
by  his  broad  panniers,  pattering  for  miles 
along  the  road — we  kept  picking  him  up 
and  passing  him  all  the  way  from  Pahoa, 
until  finally  he  disappeared  down  an  un- 
named path  into  the  very  jungle;  women 
and  children  in  white  holokus,  astride  of 
their  unpedigreed  mounts,  bound  for  some 
surfeit  of  poi  and  fish  with  relatives  at  the 
back  of  beyond:  all  this  fading  gradually 
into  utter  loneliness  as  we  approached  the 
sea.  Patches  of  dry  taro  would  suddenly 
spring  into  view,  making  your  eyes  search 
swiftly  for  the  grass  house  that  could  scarce 
be  found  among  the  foliage.  There  was, 
besides,  the  wonder  that  the  tropic  jungle 
always  arouses,  that  it  should  be  so  lush 
and  yet  so  barren  of  aspect.  Nature  is  no 
landscape-gardener,  and  in  that  unchang- 
[81] 


HAWAII: 

ing  clime  it  is  always  both  spring  and  au- 
tumn. The  tree-fern  thirty  feet  high  is 
encumbered  with  decaying  brown  stalks; 
the  ghosts  of  ohia-trees  rise  among  their 
living  kin,  stripped  to  the  bone  by  the 
ie-ie  vine,  which  embraces  and  then  kills. 
Bamboo  clumps  that  are  Hke  little  ban- 
yans crowd  out  their  neighbors  and  dance 
upon  the  tangle  underfoot.  Vegetable  life 
is  as  cheap  here  as  human  Ufe  in  the 
slums.  The  idle  jungle  takes  a  long  time 
to  bury  its  dead;  nature  is  a  beautiful 
slattern,  and  earth  very  careless  of  the 
pieties. 

We  had  left  good  roads  behind  us  at 
Pahoa,  and  we  nearly  tore  the  car  to 
pieces  getting  into  Kaimu.  A  line  of  na- 
tive houses  fronts  the  sea;  between  the 
road  and  the  surf  are  thick  groves  of  coco- 
palms,  rooted  deep  in  the  sands  of  the 
beach.  Little  black  pigs  play  tag  round 
[82] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

your  legs,  and  the  infants  of  Kaimu  run 
out,  not  to  chide  the  pigs  but  to  stare. 
There  is  no  purer  color  in  the  world  than 
this:  the  green  palms  fringing  the  brilliant 
blue  ocean;  the  big  Pacific  surf  breaking 
white  and  clamorous  on  coal-black  vol- 
canic sands.  You  scarcely  need  a  red 
holohu  in  the  middle  distance,  or  the  sea- 
washed  gray  of  the  outrigger  canoes  on  the 
shore.  And,  a  mile  beyond,  Kalapana — 
desolate  beyond  emptiness,  little  gray 
houses  set  round  a  treeless  open  common, 
with  a  little  shut  church  in  one  corner. 
What  reminiscence  of  New  England  vil- 
lage greens  is  there,  we  wondered.  Life 
has  ebbed  long  since  from  Kalapana,  and 
it  seems  to  have  kept,  of  tradition,  only 
that  bequeathed  bleakness;  as  if  nearly  a 
hundred  years  ago  it  had  passionately 
imitated  the  exotic  North,  and  then  died. 
In  1825  Kaimu  and  Kalapana  were  popu- 
[83] 


HAWAII: 

lous  towns  with  potent  chiefs.  Both  are 
tiny  remnants  now;  but  Kaimu  has  at 
least  kept  its  tropical  heritage.  Kalapana 
has  been  blown  upon  by  strong  winds  and 
washed  clean  of  color;  it  has  a  Puritan 
cast,  and  that  Sunday  afternoon  felt  like  a 
Puritan  Sabbath.  No  one  crossed  the 
common  or  peered  out  of  the  little  houses. 
Yet  as  soon  as  we  had  passed  beyond 
the  village  centre  and  come  to  the  pake 
store,  we  knew  we  were  in  Hawaii  and 
not  in  Massachusetts  Bay  Colony.  An 
automobile  stood  before  the  pake  store, 
and  it  was  filled  with  Hawaiians:  grave 
elders  sitting  in  the  tonneau,  children 
packed  on  the  steps  and  the  engine,  and 
some  one  solemnly  holding  the  wheel. 
We  were  bound  for  a  Cave  of  Refuge 
half  a  mile  off,  and  when  we  returned 
from  our  disheartening  scramble  over  rocky 
ridges — I  cannot  "boom"  the  Cave  of 
[84] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

Refuge  at  Kalapana:  it  is  not  worth  the 
scramble — the  automobile  was  still  there 
and  still  full — only  of  a  different  crowd. 
These  passengers  were  equally  motionless 
and  equally  solemn,  and  in  a  flash  the  ex- 
planation became  clear  to  us.  Some  vague 
dots  off  on  the  sands  were  the  owners  of 
the  automobile,  and  they  had  left  the  car 
for  safe-keeping  with  the  j>ake  storekeeper. 
All  Kalapana  was  busy  wiping  from  its 
'scutcheon  the  blot  of  never  having  mo- 
tored. Each  villager  was  having  his  chance 
to  sit  in  or  on  the  wondrous  vehicle.  Kala- 
pana was  sophisticating  itself,  and  in  so 
orderly  a  fashion  that  we  suspected  the 
pake  storekeeper  of  renting  out  the  price- 
less opportunity.  Perhaps  the  one  who 
took  the  wheel  had  to  pay  more.  But 
even  if  the  Kalapanans  did  to  this  extent 
belie  their  bleak  New  England  common,  I 
do  not  beheve  they  shelter  a  kahuna.  I 
[85] 


HAWAII: 

should  be  far  surer  of  finding  him  in   a 
grass  house  at  Kaimu. 

Lahaina,  on  Maui,  should  have  a  chap- 
ter to  itseK,  for  the  life  of  the  little  old 
town  has  been  a  drama.  Lahaina  is  an 
aged  gossip  sitting  by  the  sea,  careless  of 
her  looks,  her  lost  youth,  and  her  dead 
romance.  Some  tropic  towns  grow  old 
like  the  women  of  the  tropics,  completely 
and  passively.  Lahaina  is  no  better  pre- 
served than  any  Hawaiian  crone.  The 
vast  banyan  under  which  a  whole  village 
could  feast  has  been  decently  propped; 
the  "missionary  house,"  long  deserted,  has 
been  "done  up"  and  put  to  some  public 
use  or  other;  the  Lahainaluna  School,  two 
miles  away  up  the  mountain,  carries  on  a 
useful  life.  All  this  is  done  by  the  haoles 
as  part  of  the  white  man's  burden.  But 
Lahaina  herself  puts  forth  no  effort. 
[86] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

The  town  straggles  vaguely  along  the 
beach-front,  quite  without  a  plan.  There 
are  a  few  dirty  back  cross-lanes,  but  most 
of  Lahaina  is  the  one  long  band  of  houses. 
Blue  sampans  crowd  the  shore,  and  an 
Oriental  throng  of  children  bathes  and 
fights  and  plays  in  the  water  among  the 
sampans.  The  dock  is  the  business  centre 
and  lounging-place  of  the  town.  Across 
from  it  is  the  Pioneer  Hotel,  a  bare,  ve- 
randahed  structure,  seldom,  I  fancy,  any- 
thing hke  filled.  Tourists  do  not  often 
get  to  Maui;  when  they  do,  they  go  straight 
on  to  Wailuku,  a  charming,  well-kempt  lit- 
tle town,  thence  to  explore  the  enchanting 
lao  Valley  or  to  climb  Haleakala.  No  one, 
I  might  almost  say,  stops  in  Lahaina  ex- 
cept on  business — of  which  the  neighboring 
sugar  plantations  create  a  certain  amount. 
So  it  is  not  odd  that  in  the  Pioneer  Hotel 
meals  should  be  served  at  unsophisticated 
[871 


HAWAII: 

hours,  and  that  the  pubKc  rooms  should 
consist  chiefly  of  a  bar.  It  is  not  un- 
comfortable to  sit  on  the  upper  verandah 
outside  one's  room  and  watch  the  sam- 
pans, and  the  water  breaking  over  the 
reef.  But  it  is  impossible  to  think  of  La- 
haina  as  a  place  to  stay  in,  even  as  head- 
quarters for  the  wanderer.  Except  for 
business,  there  is  nothing  to  keep  any  one 
there.  Lahaina  has  so  renounced  its  past 
that  it  is  hard  even  to  reconstruct  in 
imagination  the  days  when  it  was  the 
capital  of  the  kingdom,  when  eighty  or 
ninety  whalers  would  be  rocking  in  the 
roadstead,  so  close  that  you  could  step 
from  deck  to  deck — when,  thanks  to  the 
same  whalers,  Lahaina  was  such  a  sink  of 
vice  that  even  the  lazy  Hawaiian  monarch 
had  to  bestir  himself  in  the  interests  of 
morality.  Earlier  still,  before  1849,  rich 
Americans  on  the  Pacific  coast  used  to 
[88] 


From  a  photograph  copyright  by  R.  K.  Bonine. 

lao  Needle  in  lao  Vallev — near  Wailuku 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

send  their  children  to  Lahaina  to  be  edu- 
cated; but  Lahainaluna  has  long  since  been 
turned  into  a  school  for  Hawaiians  only. 
The  hotel  proprietor  has  time  to  operate 
two  or  three  "movie'*  theatres,  running  off 
Japanese  films  for  the  plantation  laborers. 
No,  Lahaina  has  got  beyond  the  point  of 
mentioning  her  past;  she  is  not  garrulous; 
she  does  not  protest  against  the  yellow 
man;  she  sits  in  the  sun  and  takes  what 
the  day  brings.  The  vast  banyans,  the  few 
old  buildings  set  in  deep  antique  verdure, 
give  a  dignity  to  her  resignation — if  indeed 
there  is  not  an  initial  dignity  in  refusing 
to  prattle  forever  about  grander  days. 

And  we  in  our  turn  must  have  per- 
plexed Lahaina,  if  Lahaina  were  given 
— which  I  fancy  she  is  not — to  psycho- 
logic curiosity.  We  arrived  asking  for 
food  at  untoward  hours,  and  departed 
after  decent  folk  had  gone  to  bed.  We 
[89] 


HAWAII: 

invaded  palce  stores  of  a  Sunday  morning, 
demanding  articles  of  vertu  that  Maui 
had  never  heard  of.  Lahaina  manifested 
no  impatience — and  no  alacrity.  Sand- 
wiches might  be  fetched,  after  a  reason- 
able delay;  but  the  fact  that  the  Mauna 
Kea  regularly  lands  her  passengers  at  9 
p.  M.  will  never  induce  a  Lahaina  hostelry 
to  serve  a  meal  at  that  hour.  I  might 
explain  in  my  best  pidgin-English  to  a 
Chinese  tailoress  what  I  wanted — her  only 
reply  was:  "I  no  make."  And  she  could 
have  made  it — sewing-machine  at  hand 
and  shelves  full  of  stuffs  beside  her — in 
twenty  minutes  at  the  outside.  Lahaina 
had  no  standards  that  included  us.  "Most 
people  go  straight  on  to  Wailuku,"  we  had 
been  told;  and  they  do.  There  are  plenty 
of  rooms  in  the  hotel,  and  judging  from 
the  unpopulous  table  d'hote  most  of  them 
must  always  be  empty.  Yet  once,  at 
[90] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

least,  when  we  had  several  hours  to  wait 
for  a  steamer,  I  had  great  difficulty  in  find- 
ing an  empty  bedroom  to  rest  in.  I  made 
many  journeys  to  and  fro  before,  finally, 
a  Jap  boy  with  no  English  grudgingly 
opened  a  door  for  me.  Even  then  a  large 
cockroach  stalked  me  jealously  up  and 
down  the  stairs,  and  when  at  last  I  took 
possession  and  shook  down  the  mosquito- 
bar,  the  same  cockroach  (I  had  kept  her 
well  in  sight  for  ten  minutes — I  could  not 
mistake  her)  established  herself  disapprov- 
ingly on  the  floor  by  the  wash-stand  to 
chaperone  me  while  I  napped. 

We  were  destined  to  climb  Haleakala — 
of  which,  you  might  say.  East  Maui  con- 
sists. Everything  in  Hawaii  has  some 
superlative  to  distinguish  it;  and  Halea- 
kala is  the  largest  extinct  crater  in  the 
world.  If  I  had  had  my  doubts  about 
Kilauea,  I  had  them  still  more  about 
[91] 


HAWAII: 

Haleakala,  especially  as  Haleakala  meant 
a  stiff  seven  miles  on  mule-back.  Some- 
thing sinister  hung  over  Maui  from  the 
first — something,  that  is,  personally  sin- 
ister for  me;  whether  the  vast  shadow  of 
Haleakala  or  the  more  distant  and  more 
psychic  prospect  of  Kalaupapa — for  we 
were  to  visit  Molokai  before  returning  to 
Honolulu.  Perhaps  the  shadow  was  deep- 
ened by  the  knowledge  that  our  remaining 
days  in  the  Eight  Islands  were  very  few. 
My  feet  lagged  on  Maui;  I  never  wanted 
to  do  the  next  thing.  I  did  not  always 
want  to  leave  Lahaina;  I  never  wanted  to 
leave  Wailuku;  it  is  impossible  for  any  one 
to  wish  to  leave  the  lao  Valley.  Besides, 
my  heart  was  in  Hilo,  and  we  were  not  to 
see  Hilo  again. 

If  East  Maui  means  only  Haleakala  and 
its  slopes,  West  Maui  means  only  a  more 
[92] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

diversified  mountain  group.  The  two  halves 
of  Maui,  once  separate  islands,  are  now 
joined  by  a  narrow  strip  of  green  earth 
not  much  above  sea-level.  Going  from 
Lahaina  to  Wailuku,  you  skirt  the  West 
Maui  mountains,  the  road  winding  along  a 
hacked-out  ledge  hung  high  above  the  sea. 
Haleakala,  opposite  you,  steadily  refuses — 
hke  Mauna  Loa  and  Mauna  Kea — to  look 
its  height.  It  is  usually  tremendous  luck 
for  a  mountain  to  rise  straight  from  sea- 
level — witness  Rainier  and  (I  suppose)  Fuji- 
yama. Such  peaks  seem  to  tower  like  Ever- 
est. But  these  Hawaiian  mountains  are  so 
vast,  so  broad-based,  so  gradually  inclined, 
that  they  produce  less  effect  of  height 
than  of  mere  bigness.  East  Maui  is  one 
mountain;  Hawaii,  you  might  say,  is  two 
mountains.  Life  blooms  and  clings  on  the 
vast  maternal  slopes. 

Wailuku    stands    to    windward   between 
[93  1 


HAWAII: 

the  West  Maui  range  and  the  ocean;  and 
Wailuku  is  drenched  in  green  and  heav- 
enly cool.  The  Trade  blows  eternally 
through  your  rooms — a  bland  and  tem- 
pered blast.  At  your  very  door  is  the 
entrance  to  the  lao  Valley,  which  unites 
in  a  desperate  and  tantalizing  perfection 
all  the  essential  beauties  of  all  the  valleys 
you  have  seen  or  dreamed.  The  fantastic 
peaks  rise  ever  ahead  of  you  as  you  wind 
up  the  road  beside  the  stream.  As  al- 
ways in  Hawaii,  half  the  magic  lies  in  the 
gorges  that  open  on  either  side — so  near, 
it  seems,  that  you  could  stretch  your 
hand  into  them,  yet  inaccessible  for  all 
that.  They  run  back  from  the  trail  to  a 
precipice  with  a  waterfall;  and  no  human 
being  has  ever  climbed  that  cliff  or  knows 
what  lies  just  beyond.  They  are  narrow 
and  dark  with  a  perpetual  green  twilight; 
and  wandering  perfumes  invisibly  gird  them 
[94] 


SCENES  AND  BIPRESSIONS 

in.  The  lao  Valley  is  about  the  size  of  the 
Yosemite,  and  if  the  photographers  have 
done  any  justice  to  the  Yosemite,  the  lao 
Valley  is  by  far  the  more  beautiful.  It 
works  back  into  a  tangle  of  peaks,  and  the 
trail  stops  suddenly  at  a  bridge  over  the 
torrent.  Thence  you  can  only  stare.  Even- 
tually you  turn,  having  paid  one  of  those 
bitter  farewells  of  the  traveller. 

If  it  was  hard  to  speak  of  Kilauea,  it 
is  far  harder  to  speak  of  Haleakala;  for 
Haleakala  left  me  cold.  The  exquisite 
hospitality  which  guarded  and  guided  us 
throughout  that  adventure  I  would  sepa- 
rate entirely  from  Haleakala  itself.  Yet 
I  feel  treasonable  in  so  doing,  for  it  was  a 
great  lover  of  Haleakala  who  took  us  up 
— he  was  going  himself,  for  the  sixty-first 
time — and  he  and  his  household  are  a 
happy  memory.  May  I,  with  that  apol- 
[95] 


HAWAII: 

ogy,  be  rude  to  the  crater  itself?  Not,  I 
think,  without  explaining  that  I  am  a 
tenderfoot;  that  the  seven-mile  trail  from 
the  last  ranch  to  the  rim  is  not  a  trail  at 
all,  but  a  mere  indicated  route  over  a 
boulder-strewn,  ravine-cut  slope;  that  I 
made  the  trip  on  the  wisest  and  wickedest 
mule  in  the  world,  whose  wickedness  was 
by  no  means  crude,  but  rather  of  a  subtle 
and  heartless  Renaissance  type.  She  was 
a  Catherine  de  Medecis  of  a  mule,  and 
her  sardonic  pity  of  me  was  one  of  the 
bitterest  things  I  have  ever  had  to  bear. 
The  concrete  rest-house  is  perched  on  the 
rim  of  the  extinct  crater,  ten  thousand 
feet  in  air — so  close  to  the  rim  that  at  one 
corner  you  can  barely  squeeze  round  the 
little  building.  In  the  rest-house,  rolled 
in  your  blankets,  you  await  the  dawn. 
It  comes,  breaking  charily  over  a  sea  of 
clouds.  Perhaps  you  see  Mauna  Loa  and 
[96] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

Mauna  Kea — perhaps  even  Oahu — in  the 
distance;  but  chiefly  you  see  cloud,  with 
bergs  and  drift  and  ice-pack,  like  a  polar 
sea.  If  a  polar  bear  could  be  discerned, 
you  might  well  feel  like  a  discoverer.  Be- 
low you  is  the  largest  extinct  crater  in  the 
world,  its  huge  cinder-cones  lifting  towards 
you  out  of  a  half-mile  depth.  They  look 
like  titanic  bake-ovens  rusted  out  of  use. 
The  chief  romantic  interest  of  the  crater 
is  that  Kamehameha  the  First  once  chose 
to  lead  his  army  through  that  world  of 
ash  and  lava,  up  to  the  rim,  there  to  sur- 
prise and  conquer  the  King  of  Maui.  Cer- 
tainly on  the  rim  of  Haleakala  even  a  king 
might  have  expected  to  be  safe.  The  place 
enhances  the  legend  of  Kamehameha:  he 
must  have  had  a  canny  eye  for  settings 
who  chose  Haleakala,  and  the  lao  Valley, 
and  the  edge  of  the  Honolulu  Pali  for 
battle-fields.  Were  it  not  for  the  Arctic 
[97] 


HAWAII: 

imitations  of  the  cloud-sea,  one  might 
epically  dream.  But  the  mule  awaits  you, 
and  the  Polynesian  Napoleon  is  dead.  My 
companions,  it  is  fair  to  say,  did  not  share 
a  single  one  of  my  impressions  or  sensa- 
tions.   Haleakala  "got  across"  for  them. 

So,  apparently,  it  does  for  the  Japa- 
nese; for  the  guest-book  in  the  rest-house 
is  filled  chiefly  with  Japanese  names  and 
Japanese  attempts  to  celebrate  the  crater 
in  English  verse.  Like  little  Kahoolawe, 
Haleakala  has  a  Japanese  caretaker — an 
old  man  who  lives  in  a  tiny  shack  down 
the  slope  and  supports  fife,  evidently,  on 
the  aesthetic  passion.  His  friends  come 
up  to  visit  him  now  and  then,  and  I  was 
put  to  shame  that  very  morning  by  a  Jap 
who  lingered  lengthily  on  the  rim,  staring 
down  at  the  cinder-cones.  My  own  im- 
patience compared  ill  enough  with  his 
aesthetic  trance.  Another  disarming  fact: 
[98] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

that  so  often  the  last  thing  to  perish  in 
the  Japanese  should  be  his  delight  in  a 
natural  wonder;  that  he  should,  at  the 
end  of  life,  be  content  with  utter  isolation, 
feeding  only  on  sky  and  sea.  The  care- 
taker here  must  roam  the  crater  itself — 
a  stiff  adventure  for  gnarled  old  bones — 
for  he  brought  me  a  clump  of  silver- 
sword  to  hang  on  my  saddle-bow;  and 
silver-sword  grows,  on  all  the  planet,  only 
within  the  crater  of  Haleakala,  and  in 
some  other  still  remoter  place  of  which  I 
forget  even  the  name.  Yes,  I  drank  deep 
of  humility  on  Haleakala.  Who  shall  say 
if  there  was  not  in  it,  too,  a  kind  of  claus- 
trophobia, odd  though  that  may  sound  .^^ 
For  it  is  not  only  within  four  walls  that 
one  can  have  the  sense  of  being  enclosed. 
Caught  on  that  knife-ridge  between  the 
crater  and  the  trail,  with  nothing  to  do 
save  sit  and  stare,  I  felt  hemmed  in.  On 
[991 


HAWAII: 

three  sides  of  us  the  cloud-pack  cut  off  the 
world  below.  It  was  quite  possible  to  con- 
ceive of  that  spot  as  the  bourne  from  which 
no  traveller  returns.  But  I  have  apol- 
ogized long  enough  for  my  own  unworthi- 
ness.  I  would  not  discourage  any  one  from 
Haleakala. 

Back,  back  to  Olinda  and  Paia  and 
Kahului  and  Puunene  and  Wailuku,  and 
once  again  to  Lahaina;  then  Molokai,  of 
which  I  shall  tell  hereafter.  .  .  . 

One  of  our  wildest  adventures  came  to 
us  on  Oahu  itself.  The  hamaainas  had 
sent  us  to  Hauula,  a  village  on  the  wind- 
ward side  of  the  island.  We  took  a  train 
from  Honolulu  to  Kahuku — past  Pearl 
Harbor  and  Waianae  and  Haleiwa  and 
Marconi,  where  the  great  wireless  appa- 
ratus rises  starkly  out  of  a  barren  plain 
by  the  sea,  looking  like  an  illustration  for 
[100] 


From  a  photograph  hy  R.  W.  Perkins. 

The  narrow-gauge  railway  between  Kahukii  and  Hauula. 

You  puff  through  the  sugar-cane,  past  the  prosperous  M.iniion  village  of 
Laie  ...  to  Hauula. 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

some  novel  of  the  future.  In  three  hours 
you  reach  Kahuku,  and  there  the  real 
train  stops.  You  get  into  another — one 
car  and  an  engine  on  a  narrow-gauge 
track,  Hke  a  rather  bad  mechanical  toy. 
Then  you  puff  through  the  sugar-cane 
past  the  prosperous  Mormon  village  of 
Laie  (the  Mormon  faith  is  very  strong 
among  the  Kanakas)  to  Hauula.  An  ex- 
cellent little  inn,  buried  in  verdure — a  few 
cottages  round  a  green  compound,  backed 
by  a  wilderness  of  fruit-trees — receives  you 
there. 

I  did  not  take  the  diflficult  walk  to  the 
Sacred  Falls  of  Kahuwaa;  but  G.  went, 
leaving  (like  a  good  folk-lorist)  his  offer- 
ings to  Pele  all  along  the  dark  trail.  The 
little  votive  cairns  of  Hawaiian  visitors 
Hned  the  ledges,  and  there  would  have 
been  indecency  in  refusing  to  follow  suit. 
Yet  I  have  G.'s  word  for  it  that  there  was 
[101] 


HAWAII: 

more  than  folk-lore  in  his  ritual  correct- 
ness. It  is  G.  and  not  I  who  should  write 
of  Kaliuwaa,  for  he  and  not  I  trod  the 
sombre  gorge — the  authentic  chasm,  so 
he  avers,  of  Kubla  Khan.  The  photo- 
graph of  Kaliuwaa  speaks  for  itself.  The 
falls  are  some  fifty  feet  high,  and  the  cliff 
behind  them  is  unscalable.  No  white 
man,  and  no  unmythical  native,  has  ever 
been  in  the  valley  beyond,  between  the 
falls  and  the  mountain  ridges  behind. 
Small  wonder  that  the  falls  are  sacred,  or 
that  a  green  mist  of  legend  hangs  over  the 
hidden  gorge  that  leads  to  them. 

Hauula  soaked  us  deep  in  the  Poly- 
nesian solution.  We  sat  by  night  on  the 
sands,  listening  to  Hawaiian  music.  The 
faint  guitar  notes  and  the  one  rich  voice 
mingled  with  the  beat  of  the  surf  at  our 
feet — "Ua  like  no  a  like,"  "Hawaii  ponoi," 
*'The  Maui  Girl,"  "Aloha  oe,"  rising  just 
[  102] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

above  the  sound  of  the  high  tide  on  the 
shore.  The  night  was  moonless,  but  the 
breakers  showed  white  through  the  dusk; 
the  whole  world  was  narrowed  to  song  and 
sea — the  surf  like  no  other  surf,  the  song 
like  no  other  song.  We  have  heard  the 
cruel  travesties  of  Hawaiian  music  that 
some  phonographs  give,  and  wondered  why 
an  instrument  that  can  reproduce  Caruso 
should  so  insult  the  Hawaiian  voice  and 
the  Hawaiian  strings.  Wherever  and  who- 
ever the  Hawaiian,  we  found,  the  voice 
seizes  you.  They  can  all  sing,  and  with  a 
poignancy  past  the  poignancy  of  any  Italian 
aria.  You  are  infinitely  sorry  for  the  Ha- 
waiian when  he  sings;  you  feel  sorry  for 
yourself  that  you  must  part  company  with 
him.  What  is  it.^^  A  greater  liquidity  in 
the  strings  than  other  fingers  can  achieve? 
A  minor  strain  that  no  other  vocal  scale 
has  discovered?  Something,  at  all  events, 
[103] 


HAWAII: 

tliat  there  may  be  technical  words  to  ex- 
plain, but  that  there  is,  evidently,  no 
technical  skill  anywhere  to  imitate. 

On  our  second  day  in  Hauula  we  dis- 
covered signs  of  strange  activity:  busy 
goings  and  comings  in  the  little  hamlet; 
rhythmic  pounding  of  poi;  little  ovens 
smoking  in  cottage  compounds;  lets  of 
flowers  and  maile  being  woven  in  every 
garden.  The  focal  centre  of  activity  was 
the  pake  store.  I  am  afraid  that  we 
stayed  a  long  time  with  our  noses  pressed 
against  the  fence  of  the  Chinese  store- 
keeper. We  were  in  the  same  case  with 
a  very  old  woman  who  lay  full-length  out- 
side her  grass  house  down  the  road,  peer- 
ing out  at  the  passers-by:  we  were  not 
invited.  Benches  had  been  pulled  out  of 
the  court-house  and  set  up  in  the  com- 
pound; tables  had  been  fashioned  and 
were  covered  with  food  and  drink;  a  low 
[104] 


from  a  pltoluyrapli  by  li.  \\  .  I'lrkins. 

The  Sacred  Falls  of  Kalimvaa. 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

swaying  roof  of  woven  palm-leaves  shel- 
tered the  f casters  from  the  sun;  behind, 
the  size  of  the  stone  ovens  showed  that 
animals  at  least  as  large  as  pigs  were  be- 
ing roasted  underground.  We  did  not  ex- 
actly want  to  dip  our  hands  into  the  'poi- 
bowls  or  pull  at  a  tentacle  of  raw  squid; 
but  we  felt  excruciatingly  "out  of  it,"  all 
the  same — quite  like  the  old  lady  in  the 
grass  house  down  the  road.  Bathing  in 
the  ocean  was  delightful;  in  its  way  our 
own  early  supper  at  the  hotel  was  equally 
so.     Still,  it  was  very  hard.  .  .  . 

For  every  longing  malihini  there  is 
a  benevolent  kamaaina.  Suddenly,  after 
dusk,  on  the  hotel-porch,  we  found  our- 
selves being  invited — positively  invited — 
by  two  hamaainas^  to  go  to  the  luau.  By 
virtue  of  being  kamaainas,  with  a  little 
Hawaiian  to  spare,  and  of  having  fished 
and  canoed  for  a  month  or  so  past  with 
[105] 


HAWAII: 

these  particular  villagers,  they  were  free 
of  the  luau — which  was  an  exclusively 
native  festival,  given  by  the  pake  store- 
keeper and  his  Hawaiian  wife  for  their 
year-old  son.  The  kamaainas  offered  to 
take  us.  They  exacted  from  us  only  the 
solemn  promise  not  to  be  shocked  at  any- 
thing we  might  see.  It  would  never  do 
to  go  nose  in  air  to  a  native  feast  which 
had  already  been  going  on  since  11  a.  m., 
and  was  expected  to  last  for  twenty-four 
hours.  Hawaiians  are  sensitive;  it  was  a 
real  country  luau,  none  of  your  got-up 
Honolulu  affairs;  besides,  it  could  not  be 
concealed  that  every  one  would  probably 
be  quite  drunk  before  morning.  We  prom- 
ised; we  fairly  danced  through  the  dark 
lanes  to  the  pake  store.  The  other  kama- 
ainas in  the  little  inn  professed  no  desire 
to  attend;  they  had  lived  in  the  Islands 
for  twenty  years,  and,  thank  Heaven,  they 
[106] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

had  never  been  to  a  luau.  Their  noses 
were  already  in  air  at  the  very  thought. 
There  is  a  difference  in  kamaainas.  Our 
costumes  were  critically  inspected;  but 
after  a  little  dishevelling  of  ourselves  we 
were  pronounced  not  grand  to  the  point  of 
suspicion. 

One  has  to  smile  a  great  deal  in  Hawaii 
if  one  leaves  the  tourist-track.  On  Mo- 
lokai,  later,  we  smiled  unbrokenly  at  the 
lepers;  we  smiled  almost  continuously  at 
the  luau.  With  only  some  six  words  of 
Hawaiian,  there  was  nothing  else  to  do. 
The  less  an  object  or  an  event  is  in  one's 
own  tradition,  the  safer  it  is  to  smile  at 
it.  And,  oh,  the  perils  of  stalking  through 
the  Polynesian  scene  with  no  knowledge 
of  Polynesian  etiquette !  But  we  had  luck 
at  the  luau — after  a  little  the  Kanakas 
forgot  about  us. 

The  smell  assailed  us  first  as  we  stepped 
[  107  ] 


HAWAII: 

from  the  road  into  the  low-roofed  com- 
pound. Only  the  fragrant  maile-wreaths 
twined  in  among  the  palm-leaves  miti- 
gated it  a  httle.  The  great  torches — 
branches  of  the  kukui-iree  stuck  into  the 
ground  and  set  alight — added  their  fumes 
to  the  stench  of  roasted  pig  and  puppy, 
raw  fish,  poi,  and  the  hberal  sweat  of  danc- 
ing and  feasting  humanity.  We  paid  our 
scot — a  gift  to  the  pink-clad  baby,  who 
looked  nearly  luau-ed  to  death — and  were 
made  free  of  everything  that  was  going. 
Our  names,  or  at  least  some  collocation 
of  letters  that  spelled  nothing,  but  went 
down  pro  forma,  were  inscribed  by  the 
white-haired  Kanaka  uncle  in  a  very  dirty 
little  book.  We  sank  down  on  a  bench 
and  pretended,  for  a  time,  to  take  no  no- 
tice. We  smiled  impartially  at  the  poi- 
bowls,  the  torches,  and  the  ground.  Pres- 
ently we  must  have  been  voted  harmless, 
[108] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

for  the  momentary  lull  caused  by  our 
entrance  burst  again  into  sound.  People 
ate  and  drank  as  they  liked,  and  danced 
in  between.  Sometimes  they  went  to  sleep 
for  a  few  moments,  then  rose  up  refreshed. 
Such  English  as  there  was  among  the 
guests  was  spent  in  assuring  us  that  there 
was  no  drink  going  except  pink  lemonade. 
Certainly  neither  "swipes"  nor  square-face 
was  offered  to  us;  and  we  affected  a  pas- 
sionate belief  in  their  absence.  In  point  of 
fact,  I  preserve,  myself,  a  perpetual  inno- 
cence as  to  drunkenness;  I  always  think 
that  a  man  is  eccentric,  or  insane,  or  ill, 
but  never  that  he  is  drunk.  That,  some- 
how, does  not  occur  to  me  until  all  other 
hypotheses  have  been  exhausted.  I  credited 
even  the  abandoned  hula-ing  of  a  very 
agile  young  woman  in  a  blue  holoku  to 
Polynesian  manners  and  customs  pure  and 
simple.  True,  I  wondered  why  these  young 
[109] 


HAWAII: 

Hawaiian  giants  should  sway  so  gently, 
as  though  they  were  always  on  the  verge 
of  dancing;  and  some  of  them  seemed  to 
shake  hands  with  us  too  many  times  over. 
But  it  took  Chinese  honesty  to  enlighten 
me.  On  the  bench  behind  us  sat  half  a 
dozen  mothers  with  babies  in  their  arms. 
I  heard  suddenly  an  authentic  maternal 
cluck  of  disgust,  and  felt  our  own  bench 
rock.  Peering  back,  we  saw  that  a  China- 
man in  a  blue  smock  had  fallen  on  the 
ground  between  the  benches.  Some  Ka- 
naka singing-boys  thrust  their  ukuleles  into 
G.'s  arms,  lifted  the  man,  seated  him 
limply  on  the  very  end  of  the  bench,  and 
propped  him  there  as  best  they  could. 
Every  one  proceeded,  with  the  greatest 
art,  to  be  scandalized.  But  in-  five  min- 
utes a  boy  with  a  great  garland  of  white 
flowers  round  his  dark  hair  was  offering 
me  pink  lemonade,  and  again  we  got 
[110] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

eager  assurances  in  pidgin-English  that 
there  was  nothing  else  to  drink.  The 
Chinaman  (who  was  utterly  void  of  hy- 
pocrisy) had  not  yet  come  to;  and  he 
was  quite  beside  the  point.  He  remained 
beside  the  point,  although  he  had  peri- 
odically to  be  lifted  from  the  ground  and 
carried  farther  into  the  dark  environs  of 
the  feast.  He  could  no  more  sit  up  than 
his  blue  smock  could  have  sat  up  by  it- 
self. We  imitated  the  tact  of  our  hosts 
— there  were  nearly  a  hundred  of  them 
by  that  time  in  the  little  low-roofed  com- 
pound: there  was  no  Chinaman,  and  in 
any  case  he  was  only  very,  very  tired. 

There  is  a  certain  furiousness  in  that 
scene  as  I  recall  it — vividly,  for  all  the 
intervening  weeks.  We  were  there  a  Httle 
past  midway  of  the  feast,  and  we  had 
caught,  probably,  the  wildest  moment.  It 
is  fixed,  to  the  last  detail,  in  the  memory: 
[111] 


HAWAII: 

the  compound,  shut  in  by  its  pahn  roof 
from  the  night,  inflamed  by  its  guttering, 
barbaric  torches,  its  heavy  reek  cut  by 
the  pungent  perfume  of  tropic  flowers;  the 
gorging  and  singing,  and  the  spontaneous, 
savage  dancing;  every  voice,  every  body 
stirred  and  moving  to  the  time  of  the  never- 
ceasing  hula  songs.  A  few  hours  later,  one 
had  no  reason  to  doubt,  the  banana- 
clumps  by  the  roadside,  the  great  kamani 
trees  by  the  shore,  would  shelter  exhausted 
couples  who  were  sleeping  off  the  luau. 
The  hamaainas  who  would  not  go  were 
very  explicit  about  the  drunken  Kanakas 
we  might  trip  over  in  the  dark.  We  left, 
however,  before  the  feast  had  come  to  a 
sordid  decline,  though,  frankly,  all  the  more 
amiable  elements  of  orgy  were  there.  I  am 
told  that  on  such  an  occasion  one  is  fortu- 
nate not  to  understand  Hawaiian,  because 
if  one  understood  the  words  of  the  hula 
[112] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

songs,  one  would  have  to  get  up  and  go 
away.  Perhaps,  though  (contrary  to  our 
own  tradition  of  the  risque),  no  words 
could  be  so  explicit  as  the  actual  gestures 
of  the  dancers.  At  the  Panama-Pacific, 
a  little  earher,  we  had  drifted  into  a 
"show"  in  the  Zone  and  found  there  an 
exhibition  of  muscle-dancing.  That  par- 
ticular '*show"  was  closed,  later  in  the  sum- 
mer, by  the  Panama-Pacific  authorities. 
But  the  young  Hawaiian  girl,  though  she 
may  hula  in  a  holoku,  or  even  in  a  "middy'* 
blouse  and  skirt,  goes  far  beyond  any 
Little  Egypt  of  them  all;  and  the  fact  that 
she  rises  from  her  bench,  dances  (if  you 
call  it  dancing)  in  front  of  some  youth  until 
he  comes  out  to  join  her,  then  dances  in 
hke  fashion  with  him,  removes  her  utterly 
from  the  unreality  of  whatsoever  goes  on 
behind  footlights.  This  was  purely  spon- 
taneous; they  are  not  doing  it  for  pay, 
[113] 


HAWAII: 

not  even,  I  believe,  for  applause;  they  are 
as  frank  as  mating  leopards — though  I 
cannot  see  in  muscle-dancing  (if  that  be 
the  proper  euphemism  for  these  Polynesian 
agilities)  any  of  the  leopard's  grace.  You 
shrink  back  on  your  bench  not  to  impede 
them;  but  you  are  not  shocked.  At  least, 
we  scarcely  dared  to  be.  The  hula-ing  Ka- 
naka simply  does  not  come  into  the  realm 
of  morals:  he  is  a  jungle-creature  marked 
for  death;  civilization  has  never  really 
touched  him;  he  is  amiable  because  he 
was  born  so,  not  because  he  has  ever 
taken  the  Golden  Rule  to  heart.  He  will 
have  to  be  several  reincarnations  on,  be- 
fore he  is  ripe  for  the  moral  law  or  for 
anything  that  we  understand  by  religion. 
It  seemed  physically  impossible  that  such 
a  feast  should  not  end  in  pure  orgy  under 
the  stars.  There  was  nothing  suggestive 
in  the  exhibition:  it  was  completely  ex- 
[114] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

plicit;  and,  by  some  curious  inversion 
of  psychology,  was  not  disgusting  as  the 
merely  suggestive  would  have  been.  It  was 
gay,  shot  with  laughter  and  the  friendly 
rivalry  of  singing-boys,  timed  to  the  cu- 
mulative provocation  of  the  hula  music 
that  went  dizzily  on  forever — and  every 
now  and  then  they  would  break  off  and 
rush,  like  greedy  children,  for  a  jpoi-howX. 
They  were  literally  animal;  not  animal  as 
we  use  the  word,  with  a  squinting  refer- 
ence to  something  better  which  is  called 
human.  They  laughed  until  the  tears 
came;  they  were  very  kind  to  the  babies; 
to  us  they  were  positively  courtly;  they 
doubtless  said  unprintable  things,  but  there 
was  not  an  eye  you  could  not  meet.  As 
usual,  one  tried  to  make  one's  manners  as 
good  as  theirs,  even  if  one  hoped  that 
one's  customs  were  a  little  better. 

The  final  comment  was  offered  by   G. 
[115] 


HAWAII: 

after  we  returned  to  the  hotel.  I  could 
not  refrain  from  congratulating  him  on 
the  gracious  figure  he  had  made — ^his  arms 
full  of  ukuleles,  his  fingers  rolling  a  ciga- 
rette for  an  exhausted  singing-boy,  he  flirt- 
ing, meanwhile,  in  his  best  pidgin-English, 
with  very  beautiful  brown  ladies  in  snow- 
white  holokus.  *'0h,  I  sized  it  up  early," 
was  his  nonchalant  reply.  "What  you 
needed  at  the  luau  was  just  the  manners 
that  you  need  at  a  Sunday-school  picnic 
in  the  country."  I  asked  a  little  tartly — 
for  I  was  clutching  my  exotic  evening 
hard,  and  did  not  want  it  snatched  away — 
whether  he  had  ever  been  at  a  Sunday- 
school  picnic  where  the  deacons  were  carried 
out  drunk,  where  the  deacons'  wives  danced 
the  hula,  and  the  deacons'  babies  ate  raw 
squid.  He  was  imperturbable:  mutatis 
mutandis,  he  insisted,  the  social  atmosphere 
was  the  same.  But  then,  as  the  hamaainas 
[116] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

were  always  telling  him,  G.  has  the  makings 
of  a  good  Kanaka:  he  liked  2^01  (which 
tastes  to  me  like  sour  oatmeal)  from  the 
start,  and  it  is  a  matter  of  keen  regret  to 
him  that  never  once  in  the  Eight  Islands 
did  he  eat  poi4ed  puppy.  *'They  say 
it's  dehcious,"  he  still  murmurs,  a  little 
wistfully.  I  do  not  know  that  he  cares 
to  suck  out  the  true  inwardness  of  a  squid 
from  its  flimsy,  toad-like  skin;  but  he 
still  holds  to  the  Sunday-school-picnic 
theory  of  the  luau.  I  offer  it  not  only 
for  its  own  quaintness,  but  because  it 
brings  out,  better  than  all  my  words,  the 
element  of  naivete  in  the  Kanaka  festival. 

A  disconnected  tale  has  no  perfectly 
appointed  ending.  Yet  I  have  no  choice 
but  to  end.  I  should  have  liked  to  tell 
of  Puunene  plantation,  of  the  immaculate 
little  brown  creatures  who  pack  our  pine- 
apples on  windward  Oahu,  of  Onomea  on 
[117] 


HAWAII:  SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

Hawaii,  and  of  Kahului  on  Maui,  and 
a  score  of  other  things.  Most  of  all  I 
should  like  to  spend  myself  on  the  Ha- 
waiians  themselves;  for  they  are  lovable 
beyond  most  peoples,  and  I  fear  I  have 
done  them  scant  justice.  The  Hawaiian 
is  the  important  thing,  if  only  because  he 
is  passing.  Time  has  pulled  down  his 
heiaus;  history  has  destroyed  his  sover- 
eignties; museums  alone  preserve  his  art. 
Before  so  very  long  he  will  be  gone;  or 
will  linger  only  as  a  thrill  of  incomparably 
sad  music  in  the  memory  of  a  few  old 
people  whose  children  are  inheriting  the 
commonwealths  of  the  future. 


[118] 


KALAUPAPA:  THE  LEPER  SETTLEMENT 
ON  MOLOKAI 


KALAUPAPA:    THE  LEPER  SETTLE- 
MENT ON  MOLOKAI 

TO  begin  with  Kalaupapa  on  the 
note  of  comedy  sounds  perhaps 
strange;  yet  there  was  comedy,  of 
the  serious  sort,  in  our  approach  to  it. 
Nor  would  it  be  easy  to  translate  that 
complicated  adventure  without  some  hint 
of  the  states  of  mind  we  encountered  and 
traversed.  We  had  not  long  been  on  the 
shores  of  Oahu — the  scent  of  the  maile- 
wreaths  still  hung  about  us — when  we  dis- 
covered that  our  desire  to  visit  Kalaupapa 
(the  leper  Settlement  on  Molokai)  was 
going  to  make  us  unpopular.  Decent  citi- 
zens, unless  they  belong  to  the  autocratic 
and  eflBcient  Board  of  Health,  do  not  think 
about  Kalaupapa.  They  prefer  not  to. 
[  121  ] 


HAWAII: 

If  put  with  their  backs  to  the  wall,  by  the 
innocent  and  tactless  malihini,  they  de- 
liver themselves  of  language  which  in  its 
mingling  of  beauty  and  blasphemy  is  Apoca- 
lyptic, no  less.  They  tell  you  in  flowery 
words  that  the  Settlement  is  unbelievably 
beautiful  (which  it  is);  that  there  is  not 
a  happier  group  of  people  in  the  wcrld 
than  the  Kalaupapa  lepers;  that  the^r 
well-nigh  painless  existence  is  compounded 
of  "movies,"  ball-games,  horse-races,  and 
lotus-eating  idleness;  that  it  is  with  the 
utmost  difficulty  that  any  of  them,  if  pa- 
roled, are  induced  to  leave.  So  far,  so 
good;  and  they  are  very  near  the  truth. 
Why,  in  that  case,  should  the  decent  citi- 
zen so  resent  one's  interest  in  this  para- 
dise? Just  as  one  is  putting  that  question 
to  oneself,  it  is  answered  by  the  decent 
citizen.  They  don't  like  to  think  about 
leprosy;  it  is  not  a  nice  subject;  they 
[  122  1 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

wonder  at  you  for  liking  to  talk  about  it; 
hang  you,  why  can't  you  take  their  word 
about  Kalaupapa  without  preposterously 
and  morbidly  wishing  to  go  there?  No- 
body goes  there  except  on  business;  the 
lepers  don't  like  to  be  made  a  show  of; 
the  Islanders  don't  want  it  written  up; 
they  have  trouble  enough  now  with  fools 
on  the  "Coast"  who  think  the  whole 
Hawaiian  soil  a  sort  of  culture  for  the  dis- 
ease; and,  anyhow,  there  are  more  lepers 
in  Minnesota  than  in  the  whole  Territory 
of  Hawaii.  (I  was  quite  unable  to  sub- 
stantiate this,  later,  in  Minnesota.)  Noth- 
ing would  induce  them  to  visit  Kalaupapa: 
not  because  they  are  afraid,  for  there  is  no 
danger;  not  because  they  do  not  wish  to 
look  upon  horrors,  for  there  are  no  horrors 
to  look  upon;  not  because  they  are  afraid 
of  sympathetic  suffering,  for  of  course  the 
lepers  are  happy;   chiefly,  one  is  forced  to 

[  123] 


HAWAII: 

infer,  because  they  themselves  are  "nice." 
The  next  inference,  about  oneself,  comes 
all  too  quickly.  Even  the  mild  mention 
of  Stevenson  does  not  justify  one  before 
men.  And  the  result  of  the  last  cartridge 
one  has  to  shoot — "Why,  if  there  is  no 
horror,  don't  you  want  the  rest  of  the 
world,  stirred  up  by  Stevenson  and  others, 
to  know  it?*' — is  the  mere  sulky  restate- 
ment of  the  fact  that  they  do  not  want  the 
rest  of  the  world  to  know  anything  about 
it  at  all. 

Whatever  may  be  said  of  the  sorry  logic, 
the  jumbled,  contradictory  replies  of  the 
decent  citizen,  he  produces  his  effect.  Far 
from  exciting  in  one  a  mulish  desire  to 
visit  Kalaupapa  in  spite  of  him,  he  nearly 
persuades  one  that  it  is  better  to  stay  away. 
If,  with  all  mitigations,  it  is  so  bad  as 
that ! 

The  plain  truth  is,  I  believe,  that  Island 
[124] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

people  are  afraid  of  leprosy,  though  they 
are  perfectly  aware  that  their  fear  is  ground- 
less. They  are  undoubtedly  justified  in  re- 
senting the  easy  association,  in  the  mind 
of  the  world  at  large,  between  leprosy  and 
Hawaii.  They  feel  rightly  that  they  ought 
not  to  be  made  to  pay  for  the  fact  that 
they  are  taking  magnificent  and  notorious 
care  of  their  lepers,  while,  in  the  backward 
Orient  generally,  no  such  strict  tactics  are 
adopted.  "We  segregate  them  and  peo- 
ple talk;  elsewhere  they  run  about  freely, 
and  no  one  pays  any  attention,"  is  a  fair 
enough  complaint.  They  are  sensitive,  not 
without  reason;  and  one  does  not  wholly 
blame  the  Promotion  Committee  for  omit- 
ting, in  its  excellent  series  of  maps,  any  map 
whatsoever  of  Molokai — though  the  omis- 
sion is  inconvenient.  Other  factors  have 
entered  into  their  sensitiveness.  Steven- 
son, to  begin  with,  did  them  a  bad  turn  by 
[125] 


HAWAII: 

focussing  the  attention  of  the  reading  pub- 
lic on  that  remote  promontory;  doctors, 
of  all  people  in  the  world,  have  sometimes 
been  inconceivable  cowards;  there  is  al- 
ways in  every  one's  mind  the  rare  case  of 
the  respectable  white  man  or  woman  who 
has  contracted  the  disease,  God  alone  knows 
how.  And  underneath  all  is  the  fact  that 
investigators  are  still  sailing  cautiously  an 
uncharted  sea.  No  one  knows  the  whence, 
the  wherefore,  and  the  cure,  for  this  dis- 
ease. It  is  small  comfort  to  know  that 
typhus  is  transmitted  by  body -lice,  because 
in  a  stricken  country  body-lice  are  not 
easily  guarded  against;  but  it  is  some  com- 
fort. Leprosy  is  difficult  to  get,  and  is 
probably  contracted  only  by  inoculation — 
yes:  the  difficulty  lies  in  the  *' probably." 
Careful  physicians  will  not  speak  of  cures, 
only  of  ''arrested  cases."  You  cannot  be 
very  comfortable  about  anything  so  un- 
[  126] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

certain  as  all  that.  And,  finally,  though 
we  all  know  how  much  greater  is  the  men- 
ace of  tuberculosis  than  that  of  leprosy, 
tuberculosis  has  not  staggered  down  to  us, 
a  very  metaphor  of  all  that  is  horrible, 
from  the  pages  of  the  Bible.  The  only 
thing  that  the  malihini  may  reproach  the 
kamaainas  for,  in  this  connection,  is  igno- 
rance of  their  own  merits.  By  playing  the 
ostrich  about  Kalaupapa  they  lose  the 
finest  chance  in  the  world  of  being  praised. 
By  our  initial  plea,  before  the  Island  at- 
titude was  clear  to  us,  we  had  set  in  mo- 
tion benevolent  machinery  that  it  would 
not  have  been  good  manners,  by  the  light- 
est touch,  either  to  accelerate  or  to  stop. 
Some  sporting  instinct  prevented  us  from 
ever  quite  saying:  "Don't  take  any  fur- 
ther trouble";  even  as  etiquette  precluded 
any  impatience  over  the  unwinding  of  red 
tape.  By  the  time  the  red  tape  was  all 
[127] 


HAWAII: 

unwound  we  could  only,  in  decent  calm, 
await  the  event  we  had  invited.  We  could 
not  have  refused  to  go  to  Kalaupapa  with- 
out presenting  a  rare  spectacle  of  incon- 
sistency; nor  could  we  have  gone  with  any 
silly  sense  of  triumph,  as  importunate  tour- 
ists who  had  at  last  got  their  way.  It 
should  be  recorded  here  and  not  later  that 
the  visit  was  in  the  most  solemn  sense  a 
great  adventure,  and  that  our  thanks  are 
eternally  due  to  those  who  procured  and 
those  who  gave  the  permission.  One  comes 
away  with  a  desperate  desire  to  pay  trib- 
ute, and  to  cry  out  concerning  many  people 
that  they  have  foully  lied.  From  the  little 
comedy  of  our  gradual  introduction  to  the 
scene  we  came  to  the  very  noble  human 
drama  enacting  itself  lonelily  on  the  re- 
mote stage  of  windward  Molokai. 

To  most  Americans  who  have  had  no 
direct  relations  with  the  Hawaiian  Islands 
[  128  ] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

Molokai  automatically  suggests  Father  Da- 
mien  and  Stevenson's  incomparable  "Open 
Letter."  To  rake  up  old  scandals  is  cad- 
dish work;  but  not  necessarily  if  the  object 
is  rehabilitation.  One  may  tardily  defend 
a  dead  man;  and  I  fancy  I  am  not  the  only 
person  for  whom  Damien  needed  more  de- 
fending than  he  got  from  R.  L.  S.  In 
Honolulu,  where  the  truth  always  co- 
existed with  gossip,  Damien  has  his  rights. 
His  name  is  no  household  word,  but  at 
least  he  is  not,  I  fancy,  scandalously  thought 
of.  But  for  a  wider  circle,  Stevenson  and 
the  unfortunate  Doctor  Hyde,  between 
them,  have  managed  to  malign  Father  Da- 
mien almost  beyond  redress.  Most  of  us 
know  about  Damien  solely  from  that  un- 
happy controversy.  It  cannot  be  too  firmly 
or  too  often  reiterated  that  Damien  suf- 
fered an  unmystical  and  truly  glorious 
martyrdom  without  breaking  one  of  his 
[  129] 


HAWAII: 

priestly  vows.  Dirty  he  was,  apparently, 
as  Stevenson  says  repeatedly  in  his  magnifi- 
cent polemic.  Certainly  he  did  not  carry 
a  bottle  of  lysol  in  his  pocket;  if  he  had, 
he  would  doubtless  never  have  been,  in 
the  technical  sense,  a  martyr.  He  worked 
incessantly  for  the  health  of  the  Settle- 
ment: for  pure  water,  for  clean  houses,  for 
sanitation,  as  any  one  not  an  expert  could 
have  understood  it  in  the  '70's  and  '80's. 
Damien,  remember,  was  the  first  member 
of  any  religious  body  to  concern  himself 
with  that  purgatory — for  no  one  pretends 
that  Kalaupapa  was  a  paradise  then.  And 
because  there  was  no  toil  that  he  dis- 
dained, he  worked  with  the  lepers  to  build 
them  houses,  running  the  constant  risk — a 
risk  that  in  some  unknown,  unrecognized 
moment  fulfilled  itself  fatally — of  inocula- 
tion. The  "torn  and  bleeding  fingers"  of 
the  carpenter-priest  encountered,  over  tools 
[  130] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

and  timbers,  the  stumps  and  sores  of  his 
flock;  and  for  Damien  it  can  always  have 
been  only  a  question  of  time — only  a  ques- 
tion of  time  before  that  memorable  day 
when,  after  a  difficult  exploration  of  the 
canons  of  the  great  cliff  (in  search  of  a  pure 
water-supply  for  the  Settlement),  he  drew 
his  shoes  off  his  tired  feet,  found  one  heel 
bleeding  and  lacerated,  and  felt  no  pain. 

There  is  no  need  to  go  at  length  into  the 
question  here.  Damien's  own  reports  to 
the  authorities,  the  long  report  from  Mr. 
Reynolds  (the  contemporary  superinten- 
dent of  the  Settlement)  on  Damien's  work 
— called  forth  by  the  Stevenson-Hyde  con- 
troversy— tell  the  tale  quite  clearly.  Any 
one  to  whom  the  royal  and  Territorial 
archives  are  inaccessible  can  find  enough 
for  purposes  of  conviction  in  the  appen- 
dices to  Mr.  Arthur  Johnstone's  book 
on  ''Stevenson  in  the  Pacific."  No  one 
[131] 


HAWAII: 

with  taste  can  regret  Stevenson's  "Open 
Letter";  it  is  one  of  the  finest  polemics  we 
have.  But  it  is  a  pity  that  Stevenson's 
hero  should  have  been  also  his  victim,  and 
ironic  that  Stevenson,  in  the  end,  should 
hsLYe  seemed  to  agree  (for  I  think  most 
people  read  it  that  way)  with  Doctor  Hyde 
and  "the  man  in  the  Apia  bar-room." 
Stevenson  makes  us  all  feel  with  him,  for 
the  moment,  that  even  if  the  scandal  is 
true  it  does  not  matter;  but  from  the  mo- 
ment that  the  scandal  is  not  true  it  does 
matter  immensely.  There  is  all  the  dif- 
ference in  the  world  between  a  good  man 
and  a  saint;  between  excusable  human 
frailty  and  superhuman  self-control.  The 
leashes  are  off,  the  bars  are  down,  then,  for 
our  enthusiasm;  and  Damien's  very  grave, 
hushed  and  shaded  and  small,  beside  his 
Kalawao  church,  becomes  a  different  thing. 
To  the  sisters,  too,  Stevenson's  is  but  a 
[  132  ] 


ru{n  a  pfiu.uyraii'i  copynylit  by  H.  K.  ISnnine. 

Brother  Joseph  Dutton  at  tlie  grave  of  Fatlier  Damien. 

Damien's  very  grave,  hushed  and  shaded  and  small,  beside 
his  Kalawao  church. 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

squinting  tribute.  Catholicism  was  never 
dear  to  him:  whenever  he  comes  face  to 
face  with  Rome,  whether  it  is  Frangois 
Villon  writing  the  "Ballade  pour  sa  Mere" 
or  the  Franciscan  sisters  disembarking  at 
Kalaupapa,  his  admiration  halts,  his  mouth 
is  wry.  He  thinks  them  saintly  poor- 
creatures;  he  boggles  over  the  "pass-book 
kept  with  heaven."  To  him  who  does  not 
love,  it  is  seldom  given  wholly  to  see.  I 
do  not  question  the  authenticity  of  the 
"ticket-office  to  heaven."  It  sounds  like 
many  a  mild  convent  joke  that  I  have 
heard  from  the  lips  of  nuns.  The  most  de- 
vout nun  will  talk  with  familiarity  and 
gayety  of  the  things  that  are  most  impor- 
tant to  her;  homely  metaphors  are  on  her 
lips  for  the  most  reverend  facts.  Religion 
is  her  business,  and  all  her  practical  busi- 
ness, for  her,  is  religion.  The  Pauline  or 
the  Miltonic  mind  may  not  find  the  Catholic 
[133] 


HAWAII: 

practicality  alluring,  but  the  Catholic  prac- 
ticality is  not  for  that  any  the  less  Chris- 
tian. Of  Mother  Maryanne,  Stevenson 
had  nothing  but  good — in  a  little  poem — to 
say.  I  love  R.  L.  S.  as  much  as  one  can 
love  any  man  for  style  alone,  and  I  am  not 
tempted  to  quarrel  with  his  "horror  of 
moral  beauty"  that  broods  over  Kalaupapa, 
or  even  "the  population — gorgons  and  chi- 
maeras  dire."  But  things  have  changed 
greatly  since  '89  and  the  days  of  the  mon- 
archy. In  point  of  fact,  at  the  present 
day,  the  moral  beauty  is  without  horror, 
and  the  "gorgons  and  chimseras  dire"  do 
not  bulk  big  in  the  visitor's  vision. 

And  now  I  have  done  with  Stevenson. 
I  have  mentioned  him  because  his  scant 
pages  have  so  long  been,  for  many  of  us, 
our  only  document  on  Molokai.  Scant 
though  they  are,  they  are  the  pages  of  a 
master;  they  are  the  best  we  have  or  are 
[  134  ] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

like  to  have;  and  it  is  fair  that  they  should 
thus  isolate  themselves.  The  more  recent 
unofificial  accounts  that  I  have  seen  or 
heard  of — and  they  are  not  more  than  two 
or  three — are  beneath  contempt,  and,  justly 
enough,  virtually  unknown:  written  from 
the  safe  haven  of  Honolulu  and  puffed  out 
with  hearsay,  or  else  in  the  full  panic  of  a 
visit  that  turned  out  to  be  precisely  as 
bad  as  it  was  firmly  expected  to  be.  The 
CaHfornia  journalist  who  wrote  that  hands 
and  feet,  toes  and  fingers,  were  free  in 
Kalaupapa  for  any  one  who  would  stoop 
to  pick  them  up;  the  man  who  recorded 
the  terrors  of  a  twenty -four  hours'  stay — 
inventing  them  presumably  from  the  super- 
intendent's lanai,  from  which,  in  point  of 
fact,  he  could  not  be  induced  to  stir  dur- 
ing his  visit — are  among  the  chief  causes 
of  the  present  difficulty  of  getting  to  Kalau- 
papa. A  great  work,  physically,  socially, 
[135] 


HAWAII: 

morally,  has  been  achieved  there;  and  the 
quiet  heroes  who  do  not  boast  are  very  shy 
of  being  lied  about.  They  are  even  shy 
of  being  talked  about  at  all,  and  (though 
the  oflBcial  'personnel,  and,  of  course,  the 
whole  form  of  government,  have  changed 
since  Stevenson's  time)  I  do  not  make  out 
that  Island  people  are,  even  now,  very  en- 
thusiastic about  the  Damien  letter.  Ste- 
venson cannot  have  been  popular  in  Hono- 
lulu. His  constant  tendency  to  stand  by 
the  Polynesian  instead  of  the  white  man 
would  not  have  made  him  so.  His  attack 
on  Doctor  Hyde  kicked  up  a  Kona  storm 
in  the  old  missionary  aristocracy;  and  even 
those  who  had  no  personal  affection  for 
Doctor  Hyde  had  much  more  admiration 
for  him  than  for  Stevenson's  reprobate 
friend.  King  Kalakaua.  It  was  probably 
the  gutter-gossip  of  Kalakaua' s  intimate 
circle  that  gave  Stevenson  his  obvious  mis- 
[136] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

givings  about  Damlen's  morality.  Cer- 
tainly he  would  have  liked,  if  he  could 
have  done  so,  to  contradict  Doctor  Hyde. 
Whatever  one's  political  attitude  to  an- 
nexation, there  can  be  no  doubt  that  Ka- 
lakaua  was,  in  feminine  phrase,  a  "horror." 
One  is  not  by  way  of  reproaching  R.  L.  S. 
for  preferring  him  to  the  "missionaries," 
but  one  could  not  expect  the  "mission- 
aries" to  feel  that  Stevenson  had  chosen 
delicately.  I  fancy  the  traditional  objec- 
tion of  the  patriotic  Islanders  to  having 
Molokai  "written  up"  may  have  begun 
with  Stevenson  himself.  This  is,  however, 
the  merest  inference  of  my  own. 

The  technique  of  leper-segregation  in  the 
Islands  is  admirably  sane  and  simple. 
The  great  majority  of  the  lepers  are  Ha- 
waiians,  though  there  are  some  Chinese, 
some  Portuguese,  some  Japanese,  and  usu- 
[137] 


HAWAII: 

ally  a  very  few  whites.  All  officials  of 
whatever  sort  throughout  the  Territory — 
including  policemen — have,  as  part  of  their 
regular  duty,  to  report  cases  or  suspected 
cases  to  the  Board  of  Health.  Many  cases 
so  reported  are,  of  course,  not  leprous,  but, 
if  the  suspicion  exists,  examination  is  made. 
Obvious,  or  even  doubtful,  cases  are  then 
taken  to  the  receiving-station  at  Kalihi 
(near  Honolulu)  and  are  kept  there  under 
observation  and  treatment  for  six  months. 
If  they  are  declared  non-leprous,  they  are 
returned  to  their  homes  at  government 
expense;  if  the  disease  is  clinically  present, 
they  are  sent  to  Kalaupapa.  Kalaupapa, 
even,  is  not  the  exile  terminable  only  by 
death  that  it  has  been  called,  for  every 
year  a  number  of  patients  are  discharged 
from  the  Settlement  itself.  While  it  is  un- 
wise as  yet  to  speak  of  cures,  it  is  certain 
that  the  disease  can  sometimes  be  arrested, 
[  138] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

so  that  the  patient  is  once  more  a  per- 
fectly harmless  member  of  society.  In 
such  a  case  he  is  discharged  on  parole,  his 
only  duty  being  to  report  to  the  Board  of 
Health  once  a  month.  The  babies  born 
at  Kalaupapa  are  removed  from  their  par- 
ents at  birth  to  a  well-equipped  nursery, 
and  come  into  no  sort  of  contact  with 
lepers  thereafter.  If,  after  a  year,  they 
are  still  "clean,"  they  are  taken  to  Hono- 
lulu and  placed  in  the  homes  there  pro- 
vided for  them  (one  for  "non-leprous 
boys,"  one  for  "non-leprous  girls").  They 
are  cared  for,  educated,  and  prepared  for 
self-support.  If,  when  grown,  they  are  still 
"clean,"  they  go  out  into  the  world  and 
live  their  lives  among  their  fellow  beings. 
The  system  of  removing  babies  at  birth 
was  entered  on  only  seven  years  ago,  and 
it  is  too  early  for  positive  statement;  but 
so  far,  with  one  possible  exception  (this 
[139] 


HAWAII: 

being  a  baby  under  observation  at  Kalau- 
papa  when  we  were  there),  the  children 
removed  from  their  parents  at  birth  have 
not  contracted  the  disease.  That  Doctor 
Pratt  and  the  Board  of  Health  have  suc- 
ceeded in  developing  in  Hawaiians  a  sane 
attitude  to  the  disease  is  shown  by  the 
fact  that  hardly  a  week  passes  when  some 
native  does  not  enter  Doctor  Pratt's  oflfice 
in  Honolulu  and  ask  to  be  examined  for 
leprosy — though,  more  often  than  not,  his 
suspicions  are  unfounded.  Gone  are  the 
days  of  Koolau,  the  leper  who  intrenched 
himseH  in  the  Kauai  canons,  defying  the 
law. 

At  the  Settlement  itself  there  are  two 
villages:  Kalaupapa,  the  larger,  on  the 
western  side,  and  Kalawao,  three  miles 
across  from  it  on  the  east.  The  official 
purpose  now  is  to  concentrate  all  the 
activities  of  the  Settlement  at  Kalaupapa, 
[140] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

which  has  the  boat-landing.  Lepers  are 
no  longer  allowed  to  build  houses  at  Kala- 
wao, and  cottages  there  are  razed  as  they 
become  useless.  Except  for  the  United 
States  leprosarium  at  Kalawao  and  the 
federal  lighthouse,  everything  is  under  Ter- 
ritorial jurisdiction.  To  the  Settlement  at 
large  the  Federal  Government  contributes 
nothing.  The  study,  care,  and  treatment 
of  leprosy  in  the  Islands  are  financed  by 
the  Territorial  government  and  carried  on 
by  the  Territorial  officials — notably,  of 
course,  the  Board  of  Health,  the  resident 
physician,  and  the  superintendent.  All  of 
these  have  faithfully  worked  together  to 
the  superb  results  that  are  there;  more 
especially,  perhaps,  if  distinctions  can  be 
made  in  such  a  devoted  group,  is  credit 
due  to  the  superintendent,  Mr.  McVeigh, 
who  is  lord  of  the  domain.  He  is  directly 
responsible  for  it  all:  provisioning  the  Set- 
[141] 


HAWAII: 

tlement,  erecting  new  buildings,  condemn- 
ing and  destroying  old  ones,  making  life 
sanitary,  comfortable,  practicable  for  eight 
hundred  souls — the  brothers  at  the  Bald- 
win Home,  the  sisters  at  the  Bishop  Home, 
the  helpers  and  servants,  as  well  as  all  the 
population  of  lepers  themselves.  He  must 
arrange  for  every  detail  of  life — no  simple 
task  in  a  community  so  cut  off  from  the 
world.  Landward  the  single  trail  over  the 
pali  behind  is  a  dangerous  one  to  mount  or 
descend;  and  seaward  the  Kalaupapa  land- 
ing, even  for  ships'  boats  manned  by  am- 
phibious Kanakas,  not  always  safe.  Ka- 
laupapa has  been  known  to  go  six  weeks 
without  the  possibility  of  communication 
by  sea. 

All  responsibility  for  the  Molokai  lepers 
is,  as  I  have  said,  assumed  by  the  Terri- 
torial government.     Houses   are  built  for 
them  if  they  wish  it;   a  semi-weekly  ration 
[142] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

is  issued  to  them;  they  need  do  no  work 
whatever  unless  they  choose,  and  if  they 
do  choose  they  are  well  paid.  Those  who 
have  money  of  their  own  may  have  their 
own  houses  built  to  suit  themselves.  If 
the  leper  has  a  non-leprous  husband,  wife, 
or  relative  who  wishes  to  come  to  the  Set- 
tlement to  live  and  care  for  him  or  her, 
it  is  permitted.  There  are  some  fifty-odd 
of  these  kokuas  (helpers)  who,  though 
well  themselves,  make  Kalaupapa  their 
permanent  home.  (Men  have  been  known 
to  have  two  or  three  leper  wives  succes- 
sively, women  to  have  successive  leper  hus- 
bands, and  still  themselves  remain  "clean.") 
Friends  of  the  lepers  are  allowed  to  make 
the  journey  to  Kalaupapa  to  see  them — 
talking  with  them,  of  course,  only  in  a 
specially  appointed  house  through  a  glass 
screen  that  prevents  any  contact.  The 
life  of  the  inhabitants  of  Kalaupapa  is  as 
[143] 


HAWAII: 

normal  in  every  way  as  It  can  be  made. 
If  they  choose  to  work  in  their  gardens,  the 
climate  soon  gives  them  a  verdurous  little 
paradise  all  their  own.  Those  who  can 
afford  it,  and  desire  it,  may  have,  Ha- 
waiian-fashion, beach-houses.  The  rough 
land  between  Kalaupapa  and  Kalawao 
is  overrun  by  four  hundred  horses  and 
donkeys,  owned  by  lepers  who  scarcely 
ever  mount  them — pasturage,  of  course, 
free.  Medical  treatment  is  not  obligatory, 
but  is  offered  to  all,  and  nearly  all  take  it. 
Such,  briefly,  is  the  regime  that  science  and 
pity  have  collaborated  to  produce.  Arid 
it  may  sound  when  formally  set  down,  but 
nothing  so  rigid  was  ever  so  little  terrify- 
ing or  institutional. 

Of  Wailuku  and  Lahaina  I  have  spoken 
elsewhere,  but  my  keenest  "sense"  of  La- 
haina perhaps  came  on  that  evening  when 
f  144  1 


\ 


SCENES  AND   IMPRESSIONS 

we  waited,  after  all  the  town  had  gone  to 
bed,  for  the  Mikahala  to  whistle  for  us. 
By  the  courtesy  of  the  Inter-Island  Steam- 
ship Company  the  Mikahala  was  to  change 
its  schedule  (a  wild,  Conrad-ish  schedule 
of  minor  ports  and  smaller  islands,  where 
docks  are  not  and  landings  are  made  by 
the  grace  of  God)  and  make  a  special  call 
for  us  that  night  at  Lahaina.  It  has  come 
to  seem  to  us  that  a  perceptible  portion  of 
our  hves  has  been  spent  at  Lahaina  wait- 
ing for  steamers,  and  I  fancy  that  the  sense 
of  long  time  thus  spent  comes  chiefly  from 
that  imperishable  evening.  The  long  beach 
front  was  dark;  the  Jap  boys  in  the  hotel 
had  gone  to  bed;  not  a  sampan  showed  a 
light;  even  the  children,  who  apparently 
are  the  last  to  sleep  in  Lahaina,  had  for- 
saken the  shore,  and  there  was  no  sound  of 
yellow  and  brown  babies  splashing  out  of 
the  sea  to  croon  strange  syllables  to  the 
f  145  1 


HAWAII: 

tune  of  "Tipperary" — a  game  they  will 
keep  up  as  long  as  there  is  a  single  light 
left  on  the  dock.  The  only  people  up  and 
dressed  in  the  tropic  night  were  we  and 
the  English  proprietor  of  the  hotel,  who, 
with  Arabian  courtesy,  beguiled  our  vigil 
with  tales  of  longer  vigils  of  his  own  in 
the  Klondike  rush. 

A  little  after  midnight  the  Mihahalas 
whistle  came,  and  in  due  time  a  boat  swept 
darkly  across  the  lapping  waves,  through 
the  slit  in  the  reef,  and  finally  to  the  land- 
ing-stair. The  Hawaiian  purser  had  come 
with  it;  I  stretched  out  my  hands,  and  to 
him  and  the  boatmen  I  committed  my  stiff 
and  helpless  form.  "The  Kanakas  will 
take  care  of  you"  is  an  Island  formula  for 
landings,  and  it  is  impossible  to  take  it 
too  piously.  By  sheer  instinct  I  drew  my 
hands  away  from  G.  and  the  hotel-keeper, 
and  thrust  them  out  to  whatever  brown 
[  146] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

paws  would  grasp  them.  We  reached  the 
Mikahala,  and  soon  she  began  to  bob 
towards  Molokai.  Too  much  cannot  be 
said  of  the  utter  "niceness"  of  the  Inter- 
Island  officers  and  crews.  Our  stateroom 
being  positively  unnavigable  for  small- 
ness — one  hit  the  wall  at  every  motion  of 
the  ship — the  purser  offered  us  two  "apart- 
ments," which  we  accepted.  Then  he  re- 
tired, doubtless  to  take  off  the  white  shoes 
that  he  always  ceremonially  donned  when 
near  a  port.  At  sea,  he  went  beautifully 
barefoot. 

I  am  grateful,  eternally  grateful,  to  the 
Mikahala,  to  those  who  own  and  those  who 
sail  her;  but  her  motion  is  the  motion  of 
an  egg-beater,  and  identically  the  same 
whether  she  is  "under  the  lee"  of  some- 
thing or  in  mid-channel.  She  may  or  may 
not  run  to  seven  hundred  tons;  she  hoists 
a  schooner  sail  when  the  Hawaiian  captain 
[147] 


HAWAII: 

feels  like  it;  she  is  never  empty  of  sugar 
and  deck  passengers;  and  her  delightful 
morale  does  not  prevent  her  from  inevitably 
smelling  to  heaven  with  a  smell  that  I 
swear  no  pen  can  describe.  I  am  always 
seasick  on  a  small  boat,  and  I  got  no  wink 
of  sleep  that  night.  I-  was  tired  beyond 
my  fatigue  record,  and  under  the  lee  of 
Maui  I  had  time  to  reflect  a  good  deal  on 
the  decent  citizen  and  the  multitudinous 
sharpness  of  "I  told  you  so."  Thanks  to 
the  Medicean  mule  of  Haleakala  (who  had 
hated  me  at  least  as  much  as  I  hated  her) 
I  was  sore  in  every  joint;  and  though  I 
felt  vaguely  that  I  was  being  a  "sport," 
there  is  no  moral  tonic  in  being  a  "sport" 
in  spite  of  oneself.  I  knew  I  was  acquir- 
ing no  merit.  One  thing,  and  one  thing 
only,  sustained  me:  the  remark  of  a  com- 
mercial traveller  who  had  shared  our  motor 
the  evening  before  from  Wailuku  to  La- 
[148] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

haina.  "Have  you  ever  seen  a  leper?" 
he  asked,  knowing,  as  all  Maui  knew,  that 
we  were  bound  for  Kalaupapa.  "No," 
I  confessed.  "I  have,  hundreds  of  'em 
— fitted  'em  to  shoes,  heaps  o'  times." 
Blessed  be  "Windy  Ben"  !  He  flung  sun- 
light into  my  mind.  Yet,  even  so,  it  was 
not  a  cheerful  night,  and  I  hardly  knew, 
when  at  6  a.  m.  the  Jap  boy  knocked  on 
my  latticed  door  and  murmured  "Kalau- 
papa,"  whether  I  was  hearing  the  crack  of 
doom  or  the  flutes  of  heaven  where  there 
is  no  more  sea.  At  all  events,  the  Mika- 
hala  had  stopped  beating  eggs,  and  I 
dressed  and  greeted  G.  with  something  of 
relief.  G.  had  been  over  to  the  port  side 
while  I  finished  preparing  myself,  and  came 
back  reporting  Kalaupapa  "awfully  inter- 
esting" from  the  roadstead.  With  that, 
and  a  cup  of  coffee  drunk  standing  by  the 
deck  rail,  I  was  fortified,  and  we  scrambled 
[  149  1 


HAWAII: 

down  into  our  little  boat,  a  mere  stone's 
throw,  it  seemed,  from  the  concrete  jetty 
where  we  finally  landed.  The  Pacific  was 
as  calm  as  its  name  that  morning,  but  that 
same  concrete  jetty,  I  am  told,  has  a  great 
gift  of  smashing  boats  to  splinters. 

The  leper  settlement  is,  as  every  one 
knows  from  Stevenson,  a  low-lying  shelf 
projecting  beyond  the  forty-mile  cliff  of 
windward  Molokai.  It  is,  in  G.'s  phrase, 
"of  the  shape  of  a  strung  bow";  it  is  not 
more  than  three  miles  across  at  its  great- 
est width;  the  taut  string  is  the  great  pali 
that  is  Molokai's  northern  wall — fifteen 
hundred  to  two  thousand  feet  of  sheer 
rock,  insurmountable  along  its  whole  length 
save  by  one  difficult  and  dangerous  trail. 
The  shelf  is  thus  surrounded  on  three  sides 
by  ocean,  and  at  the  extreme  curve  of  the 
bow  the  federal  lighthouse  faces  the  Tropic 
of  Cancer  and  the  North  Pole.  It  is  "the 
[150] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

shore  that  hath  no  shore  beyond  it  set  in 
all  the  sea."  The  first  ghmpse  of  wind- 
ward Molokai  is  so  beautiful  that  one  scarce 
believes  it,  even  in  that  land  of  miraculous 
shore-Hnes.  Mr.  Bonine's  photographs  will 
make  more  vivid  than  can  any  words  of 
mine  the  conformation  of  cliff  and  sea-line, 
but  no  photograph  can  reproduce  that 
melting-pot  of  tropical  color,  seething  gor- 
geously in  the  morning  sun,  fanned  by  the 
sweet  Trade.  There  was  tonic  to  every 
nerve  in  the  mere  light  and  air  of  the  place. 
The  superintendent  met  us  at  the  landing, 
took  our  permit,  saw  that  we  carried  no 
camera,  and  led  us  to  a  little  motor-car. 
One  of  the  leprosarium  employees  acted 
as  chauffeur.  Doctor  Goodhue,  the  resi- 
dent physician,  was  absent  from  the  Set- 
tlement that  morning,  and  we  did  not  have 
the  privilege  of  meeting  him.  After  a  few 
moments  on  Mr.  McVeigh's  lanai  we  pro- 
[151] 


HAWAII: 

ceeded  along  the  low  sea  front,  follow- 
ing the  curve  of  the  bow  to  Kalawao,  then 
back  from  Kalawao  under  the  lee  of  the 
j)ali,  along  grassy  roads  named  for  Hono- 
lulu streets,  to  Kalaupapa.  Everywhere  we 
alighted  and  talked:  with  the  caretakers 
at  the  leprosarium,  with  Brother  Dutton 
at  the  Baldwin  Home,  with  Mother  Mary- 
anne  at  the  Bishop  Home,  with  the  Ha- 
waiian matron  at  the  nursery,  and  always 
with  Mr.  McVeigh  himself,  who  threw  his 
domain  open  to  us  in  friendly  wise.  Every- 
where were  lepers — crowded  about  the 
landing-stair  to  watch  the  unloading  of 
supplies;  sitting  in  front  of  the  Molokai 
store;  working  as  Kanakas  can  work,  and 
idling  as  only  Kanakas  can  idle,  so  grace- 
fully that  it  seems  a  career  in  itself;  nearly 
all  smiling,  waving  their  hands,  lifting  their 
hats,  or  running  up  to  Mr.  McVeigh  for  a 
word  of  direction  or  advice. 
[152] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

Stevenson  and  others  had  warned  us  of 
much  hand-shaking  to  be  done.  I  had 
been  reassured  as  to  that  before  ever  set- 
ting foot  on  Molokai;  still,  I  wore  gloves. 
G.  declared  that  he  should  feel  both  tact- 
less and  a  fool,  and  would  wear  none.  He 
had  more  prevision  of  facts  and  atmos- 
phere than  I.  On  no  occasion  did  we  have 
to  shake  hands  with  the  lepers:  a  smile,  a 
nod,  an  "Aloha,"  were  all  that  was  ex- 
pected of  us.  White  magic  seems  to  be  at 
work  in  Kalaupapa.  I  can  record  it  as 
solemn  fact  that  once  you  are  on  the 
promontory  all  panic,  fear,  or  disgust 
drops  utterly  away.  The  one  step,  from 
the  world  that  is  not  Kalaupapa  to  the 
world  that  is,  does  the  trick:  a  trick  appre- 
ciable only  for  those  who  on  some  noisy 
summer  noon  have  come  suddenly  into  the 
dusk  and  incense  and  vastness  of  a  great 
cathedral.  There  is  nothing  church-like 
[153  1 


HAWAII: 

in  this  atmosphere:  it  is  all  sunlight  and 
Polynesian  cheer;  but  the  mental  change 
is  as  great.  I  got  at  Kalaupapa — and  got 
it  before  five  minutes  were  sped — the  high- 
est impression  of  social  decency  that  I 
have  ever  had.  The  highest,  probably, 
for  the  reason  that  this  is  not  the  natural 
atmosphere  for  social  exquisiteness  to  flour- 
ish in;  and  to  find  here  breeding  that 
would  do  credit  to  high  birth  and  good 
fortune  is  to  have  swift  intuition  of  a 
miracle.  Never  have  I  been  so  tightly 
held  up  to  civilization  as  on  Molokai. 
The  Hawaiian  is  naturally  amiable,  anxious 
to  please,  and  easily  contented;  Kalau- 
papa is  exceedingly  beautiful,  and  enjoys, 
as  Doctor  Goodhue  has  said,  "the  most 
perfect  climate  on  earth  short  of  Eden"; 
leprosy  is  not,  I  am  told,  in  itself  a  painful 
disease.  Yet  even  so,  leprosy  and  exile 
are  not  essential  elements  of  Paradise,  and 
[  154] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

if  ever  credit  was  due,  it  is  due  here. 
Faces  smiled  at  us  now  and  then  that  could 
scarce  smile  at  all,  and  even  in  the  stare 
that  the  flesh  made  senseless  one  knew 
that  "Aloha"  and  no  other  meaning  lay- 
behind  the  mask. 

As  we  left  Kalaupapa,  a  bell  was  sound- 
ing faintly,  and  we  saw  the  sisters  going 
to  mass.  The  Union  and  Mormon  churches 
were  austerely  closed.  We  passed  the  race- 
course and  ball  field  (there  is  a  triangular 
league  at  the  Settlement,  and  Mr.  Mc- 
Veigh, among  his  other  activities,  serves  as 
umpire),  with  its  grand-stand — empty, 
naturally,  at  seven  in  the  morning.  Be- 
yond Kalaupapa  the  wild  low  shore  that 
curves  to  Kalawao  is  humanly  barren. 
Only  the  lighthouse  and  a  few  beach  houses 
break  the  pasturage  of  horses,  donkeys,  and 
cattle.  At  Kalawao  we  alighted  to  inspect 
the  federal  leprosarium.  Not  a  room,  not 
[155] 


HAWAII: 

an  alcove,  not  a  workshop  of  that  great 
congeries  of  buildings  escaped  us.  "But 
nothing  in  the  sounding  halls  he  saw." 
The  leprosarium  has  been  finished  for  seven 
or  eight  years,  and  for  only  some  six  weeks 
of  that  time  has  it  harbored  patients. 
Four  or  five  caretakers  keep  the  frame  of 
it  from  utter  ruin;  but,  except  for  the  vast 
laboratory  where  the  federal  physician  (ab- 
sent on  leave  in  the  States  at  the  time  of 
our  visit)  struggles  heroically  with  what 
to  a  scientist  must  be  very  like  despair,  the 
place  is  disused.  The  wards  are  empty, 
save  of  piled-up  furniture,  much  of  which 
has  never  even  been  uncrated.  A  huge 
piece  of  apparatus,  as  intricate  and  unin- 
telligible to  look  upon  as  a  seismograph, 
has  a  room  to  itseK  to  fall  to  pieces  in. 
The  dynamo  is  kept  in  running  order  to 
prevent  it  from  rusting  out,  though  what 
it  lights  and  why  are  a  mystery  to  the  out- 
[156] 


'^    t, 


f-    J 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

sider.  The  treasures  of  the  big  machine- 
shop  would  make  a  Ilonokdu  pkimber  turn 
in  his  bed  to  dream  of  grand  larceny.  The 
place  is  as  modern  as  an  Eastern  hospital, 
and  as  desolate  as  the  moated  grange. 
The  heroic  labors  of  the  present  federal 
appointee — and  I  am  told  that  they  are 
heroic — cannot  suffice  to  redeem  the  lepro- 
sarium from  uselessness.  Even  the  unin- 
formed visitor  must  feel  bitterness  to  see 
the  dynamo  purring  as  vainly  as  a  cat  by 
the  fire,  when,  a  few  miles  away,  the  Set- 
tlement itself,  the  homes,  the  nursery,  the 
very  hospital  must  do  with  lamps  and  can- 
dles because  the  Territorial  government 
cannot  afford  a  dynamo.  The  truth  is  that 
the  leprosarium  was  ''queered"  in  the  early 
days  of  its  being,  and  since  then  the  federal 
appropriation  has  been  greatly  cut  down 
— not  unnaturally,  since  no  apparent  re- 
sults came  from  the  larger  sum.  Tribute 
[  157  ] 


HAWAII: 

to  the  work  of  Doctor  McCoy  was  every- 
where voluntary  and  unstinted,  but  never 
was  man  more  handicapped  by  past  events 
with  which  he  had  nothing  to  do.  It  is 
not  Hkely  that  he  will  ever  have  any  pa- 
tients at  the  leprosarium  itself.  Exile  to 
Molokai  is,  of  course,  not  always  volun- 
tary, but  once  there  the  patient  finds  his 
liberty  well-nigh  complete.  He  need  take 
no  treatment  unless  he  wishes.  Volun- 
tarily once  some  lepers  went  to  the  lepro- 
sarium for  treatment,  but  a  few  weeks  of 
confinement  sufficed,  and  they  fled.  It 
would  not  occur  to  any  leper  now — so 
vivid  is  that  chapter  of  tradition — to  go 
to  Kalawao  for  treatment,  and  even  did 
Hawaiian  psychology  change,  the  hospital 
is  scarcely  now  in  condition  or  in  funds  to 
take  care  of  them.  Not  without  relief  did 
we  turn  from  this  grave  of  humanitarian 
hopes  to  make  one  more  call  in  Kalawao 
[158] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

— on  Brother  Dutton  at  the  Baldwin 
Home. 

This  was  the  scene  of  Damien's  labors 
and  his  death.  Across  the  grassy  road  is 
Damien's  church  and  beside  it  his  grave. 
The  Home  itself,  where  he  lived,  is  now 
under  Brother  Dutton's  charge,  and  after 
the  long  years  nothing  remains  of  prin- 
ciple or  aspect  that  gave  it  the  name  of 
"Damien's  Chinatown."  Mai  pake  (the 
"Chinese  Evil")  is  Hawaiian  for  leprosy; 
and  it  so  happened  that  of  the  group  of 
lepers  on  Brother  Dutton's  tiny  porch — 
some  ten  or  a  dozen — through  which  we 
had  to  make  our  way,  only  one,  a  China- 
man, could  positively  not  be  looked  at. 

Brother  Dutton's  little  crowded  porch 
was  my  fire-test;  after  that  there  was 
nothing  in  Kalaupapa  I  could  not  face. 
A  curious  medley  of  emotions  is  the  re- 
ward of  the  visitor  to  Kalaupapa,  and  one 
[159] 


HAWAII: 

of  the  hardest  with  which  to  deal  is  this 
sudden  fear,  face  to  face  with  a  leper  who 
is  all  but  touching  you,  of  not  striking  the 
human,  right  note.  It  does  not  happen 
often — it  is  pitifully  true  that  haK  the  vis- 
ible population  of  the  Settlement  would  be 
unsuspected  by  the  layman  of  any  dread 
illness.  I  honestly  believe  that  the  worst 
of  it  is  the  mere  knowing  that  they  are 
lepers.  But  now  and  then  one  is  jflung 
suddenly  on  the  mercy  of  one's  instincts. 
There  is  no  time  to  decide  whether  to  look 
or  not  to  look;  to  fix  the  exact  shade  of 
decent  attention  between  aversion  and 
curiosity.  One  must  not  stare,  one  must 
not  shrink;  and  the  vision  of  unspeakable 
disfigurement,  just  because  it  is  so  rare, 
finds  one  unprepared  and  praying  inwardly, 
after  the  visual  shock,  that  one's  smile  was 
in  the  right  place  and  the  movement  of 
one's  eyes  and  muscles  decorous  and  un- 
[160  1 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

hasty.  In  a  case  like  that,  one's  ancestors 
are  responsible,  and  one  hopes,  for  their 
credit,  that  the  smile  which  feels  a  little 
stiff  has  not  looked  so.  For  to  give  pain 
to  one  of  these  unfortunates  would  be  high 
treason  to  the  spirit  of  the  place.  Their 
manners  never  fail.  We  had  read  that 
they  thrust  themselves  upon  the  visitor  in 
eagerness  of  welcome;  we  had  heard  from 
the  decent  citizen  that  they  shrank  from 
being  looked  at.  Both  statements  were  in 
intent  discouraging,  and  neither  is  true. 
You  walk  through  Kalawao  and  Kalaupapa 
as  you  might  walk  through  any  Hawaiian 
village,  and  if  there  is  embarrassment,  it 
is  all  on  your  side.  No  one  intrudes  him- 
seK  on  your  path ;  no  one  shrinks  from  your 
sight.  They  expect  to  look  and  be  looked 
at,  and  their  greetings  are  too  frequent 
and  too  spontaneous  for  self-consciousness 
of  any  sort.  Perhaps  they  seem  a  hint 
[161] 


HAWAII: 

more  cordial  than  folk  in  the  other  islands, 
but  life  here  is,  after  all,  far  emptier  of 
strangers  than  even  in  Kalapana  or  Kaimu. 
Save  for  the  worst  stricken,  they  are  less 
apathetic  than  the  men  pounding  poi  or 
mending  fish-nets  on  the  shores  of  Hawaii 
or  Maui.  They  are  a  little  more  glad  to 
see  you,  but  they  quite  realize  that  you  are 
none  of  their  business.  The  extraordinary 
naturalness  of  the  Settlement  is  its  great 
feature  both  to  eye  and  mind.  Much  of 
one's  visit  is,  in  a  sense,  without  incident, 
because  there  is  nothing  "special"  to  stare 
at.  You  meet  people  going  about  their 
business  or  pass  them  sitting  on  their 
porches,  just  as  elsewhere.  Some  of  the 
leper  homes  are  as  charming  as  any  of 
their  size  in  Honolulu;  some  are  desolate 
like  certain  shacks  in  Hauula  or  Olaa. 
There  may  be  a  riot  of  foliage  or  a  barren 
enclosure.  Here,  as  elsewhere,  there  is  a 
[162] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

difference  in  human  beings — that  is  all. 
Prizes  are  offered  yearly  for  the  best  gar- 
den, but  it  is  apparently  held  no  sin  not 
to  compete.  Never  was  philanthropy  less 
stern.  Beretania  Street,  King  Street — the 
grassy  roads  take  the  names  of  Honolulu 
streets;  and  there  is  pathos  in  that,  but  it 
is  a  brave  gesture,  too.  There  is  a  Catholic 
Red  Cross  Society  in  Kalaupapa  (the  Cal- 
vinistic  and  Mormon  pastors  "were  not 
interested"),  and  lepers  out  of  their  strength 
minister  to  lepers  in  their  weakness — de- 
livering medicines,  calling  on  the  sick  and 
reporting  cases  to  the  physicians,  waiting 
at  table  on  "holiday  fete  occasions" — doing 
whatsoever  their  hands  find  to  do. 

Remember,  too,  that  the  human  comedy 
goes  on  in  Kalaupapa  as  well  as  elsewhere. 
Litigation  and  "swipes"  (a  villainous  drink 
brewed  from  any  vegetable  thing  that  will 
ferment)  are  as  dear  to  the  leper  as  to  the 
[163] 


HAWAII: 

"clean"  Kanaka,  and  it  is  hard  to  dis- 
suade him  from  pursuing  them.  Most  of 
the  disputes  are  settled  out  of  court  by 
Mr.  McVeigh  at  his  garden  gate — how 
satisfactorily  in  general  can  be  inferred 
from  the  expression  with  which  well-nigh 
all  faces  are  turned  to  him;  but  sometimes 
the  full  pomp  and  joy  of  a  lawsuit  is 
achieved.  There  are  a  court-house  and  a 
jail,  a  native  judge  and  a  native  policeman 
(both  lepers);  every  facility,  indeed,  for 
the  happy  airing  of  quarrels  in  formal 
fashion.  With  "swipes,"  Mr.  McVeigh 
admitted,  he  has  his  troubles:  he  some- 
times makes  eight  or  ten  arrests  a  month. 
They  will  never  learn;  like  children,  they 
are  unquenchably  hopeful;  potato-parings, 
or  almost  anything  else,  will  serve;  and  a 
little  group  goes  up  the  pali  or  into  a 
graveyard  or  to  any  other  appropriate 
spot,  and  drinks  until  discovered.  "You 
[164] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

see,  if  we  could  only  have  a  saloon,"  mused 
the  superintendent,  with  tender  irony,  "it 
would  be  an  ideal  existence."  Every  now 
and  then  a  request  for  divorce  comes  from 
Kalaupapa  to  the  proper  official  in  Hono- 
lulu. "Please  divorce  me  from  my  hus- 
band [or  wife]  in "  is  apt  to  be  all  that 

is  said.  Leprosy  is  ground  for  divorce  in 
the  islands;  and,  while  many  follow  a 
stricken  spouse  to  Molokai,  many,  of  course, 
do  not.  In  such  a  case  the  leper,  man  or 
woman,  is  apt  to  find  an  affinity  in  the 
Settlement  itself  and  to  want  freedom  to 
marry  there.  The  "clean"  helpmeet  left 
at  home  is,  one  supposes,  freer  to  indulge 
his  fancy  without  such  formalities  than 
the  leper  under  constant  supervision;  which 
would  account  for  the  oddness  of  divorce 
proceedings,  starting  from  this  end.  It 
sounds  grotesque  at  first,  but  it  is  part  of 
the  high  normality  of  Kalaupapa.  And 
[165] 


HAWAII: 

many  of  the  lepers  are  personable  creatures 
— still  magnificent  in  strength,  and  show- 
ing to  the  eye  no  hint  of  ruin.  Moreover, 
Doctor  Goodhue,  the  resident  physician, 
performs  many  operations,  especially  in 
cases  of  the  tubercular  type,  for  purely 
aesthetic  reasons.  In  the  wisdom  of  his 
heart  he  turns  beauty-doctor,  and  they 
look  in  a  glass  and  find  comfort.  Let  loose 
in  Kalaupapa  a  shrill  eugenist  from  the 
East,  and  you  would  soon  have  a  Kanaka 
hell.  It  is  cause  for  thanking  God  that  the 
Settlement  is  managed  by  men  who  can 
make  science  and  religion  walk  hand  in 
hand.  This,  too,  was  a  question  that  pre- 
occupied the  ascetic  Damien,  to  whom 
marriage  was  a  sacrament  and  fornication 
of  the  devil:  it  was  Damien  who  first 
pleaded  that  husbands  and  wives  should 
not  be  separated  against  their  will. 

"Damien's  Chinatown,"  as  I  have  said, 
[166] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

no  longer  hints  of  the  slum.  Brother  Dut- 
ton  had  a  long  Civil  War  experience  to 
prepare  him  for  his  work  at  Kalawao,  and 
the  compound  of  the  Baldwin  Home,  with 
snow-white  cottages  set  round  a  noble 
greensward  that  centres  in  an  immense 
lauhala  pahn,  has  a  sort  of  military  ex- 
quisiteness.  His  study  was  filled  with 
shelves  on  which  books  and  medicines  dis- 
puted the  space.  The  low  door  gave  on 
the  crowded  porch;  at  one  end  is  the  little 
room  where  sores  are  dressed;  somewhere 
beyond,  I  am  told,  is  Damien's  own  bed- 
room, where  his  successor  sleeps.  He  at 
least  had  time,  while  he  served  Damien, 
to  worship  the  man,  for  he  is  unwilling,  I 
believe,  even  to  stray  from  Kalawao — to 
be  out  of  sight,  as  it  were,  of  Damien's  very 
footprints.  Happily  Damien  is  like  to  be 
the  last  (as  he  was,  immortally,  the  first) 
of  Molokai  martyrs.  Of  saints,  uncanon- 
[167] 


HAWAII: 

ized,  it  has  held  many,  and  will  yet  hold 
more.  As  always  happens,  when  the  world 
goes  in  for  informal  canonization,  some 
quite  unmerited  sainting  has  been  done, 
and  more  that  should  be  done  is  to  this 
day  neglected.  But  the  whirligig  of  time 
brings  in  his  revenges,  and  some  day  these 
men  and  women  will  get  their  due,  though 
it  is  a  very  faint  light  of  publicity  that 
beats  on  Kalaupapa. 

The  Bishop  Home  for  women  and  girls 
at  Kalaupapa  corresponds  to  the  Baldwin 
Home  for  men  and  boys  at  Kalawao;  and 
here,  even  in  the  sisters'  tiny  cottage  fac- 
ing out  on  their  green  compound,  was 
the  authentic  convent  atmosphere.  Mother 
Maryanne,  in  her  little  parlor,  was  the 
blood-kin  of  all  superiors  I  have  ever 
known:  the  same  soft,  yellowed  skin,  with 
something  both  tender  and  sexless  in  the 
features;  the  same  hint  of  latent  authority 
[168] 


w 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

in  the  quiet  manner;  the  same  gentle  aris- 
tocratic gayety;  the  same  tacit  endeavor 
to  make  human  pity  co-terminous  with 
God's.  Like  other  superiors  I  have  known, 
from  childhood  up,  she  seemed  an  old,  old 
woman  who  had  seen  many  things.  It  was 
only  when  one  stopped  to  think  of  the  pre- 
cise nature  of  those  things  which,  in  thirty 
years  on  Molokai,  Mother  Maryanne  has 
seen,  that  the  breath  failed  for  an  instant. 
The  parlor  was  half  filled  with  garments 
ready  to  be  given  out  to  lepers,  and  if  one 
but  glanced  through  the  window,  one  saw 
the  pitiful  figures  on  the  cottage  porches 
across  the  compound.  Yet  those  eyes  of 
hers  might  have  been  looking  out  on  a 
Gothic  cloister  this  half -century.  She  con- 
fessed apologetically  that  the  night  had 
been  hot  and  sleep  difiicult.  And  once 
again  the  malihinis  felt  sheer  impotent  rage 
that  they  could  not,  with  their  own  hands, 
[169] 


HAWAII: 

wrench  the  federal  dynamo  from  its  mag- 
nificent foundations  and  give  Mother  Mary- 
anne  an  electric  fan.  Rage,  however,  is 
the  distinguishing  mark  of  the  malihini — 
no  such  emotion  stalks  abroad  in  heroic 
Kalaupapa.  "You  wouldn't  think  we'd 
be  busy  here,"  Mother  Maryanne  ventured, 
smiling,  "but  there  is  a  good  deal  to  do." 
So  natural  has  it  come  to  seem,  to  five 
sisters,  to  manage  life  for  some  eighty-odd 
lepers.  The  youngest  inmate  of  the  Bishop 
Home  is  five,  the  oldest  eighty.  It  was 
not  hard  to  imagine  the  sisters  busy.  As 
we  walked  out  across  the  compound,  set 
round  with  cottages,  a  sister — pink-and- 
white  and  blooming — waved  her  free  hand 
at  us  from  a  porch.  The  other  hand  held 
the  bandaged  stump  of  a  leper.  Beside 
the  two  a  woman  squatted  on  the  lanai; 
a  creature  of  no  age  or  race,  her  head  a 
mere  featureless  lump.  Yet  just  beyond 
[170] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

the  compound,  where  the  new  home  for 
advanced  cases  was  building,  the  leper  luna 
ran  up  to  consult  Mr.  McVeigh,  and  a 
finer-looking  Kanaka  I  have  never  seen — 
whiter  teeth,  more  stalwart  shoulders,  or  a 
gayer  smile.  These  are  the  contrasts  of 
Kalaupapa;  such  are  the  hierarchies  of  the 
doomed.  It  was  not  in  ourselves  that  we 
found  the  even  temper  to  face  these  things 
as  naturally  as  the  sights  of  any  street: 
the  place  carries  its  own  antidote  to  its 
own  sights.  All  have  worked  together  to 
produce  that  miraculous  morale  which  im- 
munizes even  the  stranger  within  their 
gates.  Yet  we  grew  to  feel,  both  of  us, 
that  we  bore  that  morale  like  an  icon  with 
us  in  the  person  of  the  superintendent  him- 
self. The  duties  and  the  "spheres"  of  the 
others  are  limited;  he  alone  is  everywhere, 
and  all  things  are  subject  to  him.  No 
matter  how  admirable  his  collaborators, 
[171] 


HAWAII: 

that  wondrous  fabric  of  science  and  pity, 
of  common  sense  and  cheerfulness,  might 
fall  to  pieces  like  a  hut  of  twigs  if  he  did 
not  keep  it  whole. 

The  hospital  is  the  last  western  outpost 
of  the  Settlement;  very  close  to  the  pali  it 
looks  from  the  roadstead.  Most  lepers  on 
Molokai  die  of  other  things  than  leprosy 
— intercurrent  diseases,  which  their  weak- 
ened systems  cannot  resist.  Even  so,  the 
hospital  is  bound  to  be  a  place  of  last  re- 
sort. .  .  .  We  did  not  go  in,  though  the 
chance  was  given  us.  Only  a  physician, 
a  priest,  or  a  friend,  only  some  one  who 
can  minister  to  the  remnant  of  a  creature 
there  lying  helpless,  has  a  right,  we  simul- 
taneously felt,  to  enter.  I  have  been  in 
a  big  hospital  and  seen  patients  who  were 
to  die  in  an  hour  or  two,  and  not  willingly 
would  I  again  feel  so  indecent  as  I  did 
then.  Mr.  McVeigh  thought  our  decision 
[172] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

right,  though  he  told  us  that  there  were 
now  and  then  visitors  who  wanted  most 
of  all  to  see  the  hospital.  To  each  his  own 
code;  but  our  inhibitions  laid  a  check,  at 
that  point,  on  our  passion  for  fact.  We 
had  seen  enough  to  fill  out  easily  the  vis- 
ual tale  of  terror  to  the  utmost,  if  we 
chose.  I  will  not  pretend  that  natural 
distaste  did  not,  in  my  case,  aid  manners. 
Probably  it  did;  though  I  know  that  one 
could  have  borne  in  Kalaupapa  things  one 
could  not  bear  elsewhere.  When  your 
eyes  have  encountered  a  man  whose  blind 
face  is  one  undulating  purple  sore,  or  a 
man  whose  mouth  is  a  great,  gashed-in 
triangle,  seeming  to  fill  the  whole  coun- 
tenance from  eyes  to  chin,  you  would  be 
singularly  dull  if  you  could  not  guess  at 
any  mutilation  disease  is  capable  of.  In 
any  case,  it  was  very  clear  to  us,  as  we 
stood  making  our  quick  decision  in  the 
[173] 


HAWAII: 

midst  of  all  that  tropic  sweetness,  that  we 
were  doing  the  mannerly  thing.  It  may 
be  that  our  refusal  cost  us  an  invitation 
to  visit  the  home  for  advanced  cases — 
though  I  doubt  it.  At  all  events,  it  was 
according  to  the  very  spirit  of  the  Settle- 
ment not  to  go  and  stare,  uselessly  and 
with  a  layman's  ignorance,  at  those  who 
must,  by  no  will  of  their  own,  offend 
every  sense.  Neither  of  us  has  ever  re- 
gretted for  a  moment  our  moral  squeam- 
ishness. 

Before  going  across  to  the  "movie" 
theatre,  we  visited  the  nursery — established, 
I  believe,  largely  through  the  efforts  of 
Governor  Pinkham  while  serving  on  the 
Board  of  Health.  He  has  always  been 
keenly  interested  in  the  welfare  of  the 
lepers.  Thirteen  babies  rolled  and  played 
and  gurgled  in  the  big  sun-room.  They  rep- 
resent the  birth-rate  for  the  last  year.  At 
[174] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

one  end  of  the  house  is  a  small  room  where 
one  or  two  cribs  are  placed  against  a  glass 
partition.  Here  the  parents  can  come  and 
look  at  their  children.  No  caress  is  pos- 
sible, and  before  the  babies  are  old  enough 
to  have  any  feeling  of  human  kindness 
they  are,  if  "clean,"  taken  to  Honolulu. 
Provision  is  made  for  them  there  as  I  have 
elsewhere  described  it.  It  is  the  saddest 
spot,  if  you  like,  in  Kalaupapa;  more  linger- 
ingly  sad,  perhaps,  to  us  even  than  to  the 
victims  of  this  especial  destiny.  Shall  I 
seem  callous  if  I  recall  the  fact  that  Ha- 
waiians,  though  devoted  to  children  in  gen- 
eral, are  quite  as  apt  to  give  their  first- 
born away  at  birth  as  to  adopt  an  eleventh 
when  they  have  already  ten  at  home? 
Both  are  characteristic  gestes  to  a  Kanaka. 
It  is  quite  the  thing  to  give  your  baby  to 
your  best  friend;  sometimes  you  get  the 
best  friend's  baby  in  exchange,  and  some- 
[175] 


HAWAII: 

times  you  do  not.  At  all  events,  that  well- 
known  trait  of  Hawaiian  psychology  was 
all  we  had  to  comfort  us,  and  I  pass  it  on 
for  mitigation.  Across  the  hospital  com- 
pound, on  the  lanai  of  the  matron's  own 
cottage,  a  girl  baby  crawled  about  by  her- 
seK — under  observation  for  a  spot  on  her 
arm.  They  had  good  hope  that  the  spot 
was  meaningless:  may  her  isolation,  ere 
this,  be  over! 

It  was  time  to  be  getting  back  to  the 
Mikahala,  which  was  patiently  waiting  in 
the  roadstead  until  we  should  be  ready  to 
go.  But  we  had  still  to  see  the  little 
"movie"  theatre  and  the  ice-making  plant. 
Mr.  R.  K.  Bonine,  of  Honolulu,  installed 
the  "movie"  apparatus  for  the  govern- 
ment. A  plaster  screen  in  the  open  fronts 
a  score  of  rough  benches,  lightly  roofed 
over.  Twice  a  week  the  inhabitants  of 
Kalaupapa  gather  on  the  benches,  and  Mr. 
[176] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

McVeigh  shows  them  films.  It  was  good 
to  see,  good  to  know  about;  so  was  the 
ice-making  plant.  But  again  we  wished 
our  hands  held  the  price  of  a  dynamo. 
The  Territorial  government  taxes  itself 
almost  beyond  its  power  to  do  the  mag- 
nificent work  it  does;  those  in  authority, 
doctors  and  laymen,  spend  and  are  spent 
in  all  good  faith,  doing  their  day's  work  in 
the  manner  of  strong  men,  the  world  over, 
with  httle  talk  and  many  deeds.  Some- 
time, we  may  hope,  leprosy  will  be  stamped 
out  in  the  Eight  Islands,  and  the  sorry  gift 
of  the  Orient  to  Hawaii  will  be  forgotten. 
But  I  should  like  to  think  that  before  the 
hospital  goes  to  welcome  ruin  it  will  be 
electric-lighted.  I  should  even  like  to  think 
that  Mother  Maryanne,  before  she  dies, 
will  have  an  electric  fan.  And  I  am  very 
impatient  with  the  useless  monster,  perfect 
in  all  its  parts,  that  purrs  in  seclusion  over 
[177] 


HAWAII: 

at  Kalawao.  Nowhere,  for  example,  could 
a  few  miles  of  wire  do  more  good.  But 
federal  red  tape  must  go  on  unwinding; 
and  doubtless  I  have  already  said  too  much 
for  the  proper  pride  of  the  Territorial  oflfi- 
cials.  When  they  have  sufficed  to  so  much, 
it  is  perhaps  the  last  word  of  tactlessness 
to  reveal  the  fact  that  there  is  anything 
they  have  not  been  able  to  do.  I  hope  I 
may  without  tactlessness  record  that  there 
was  real  regret  in  bidding  Mr.  McVeigh 
good-bye,  for  it  is  not  often  that  one  meets 
unexpectedly,  in  the  flesh,  with  a  great 
man. 

We  had  company  back  in  our  boat  to 
the  Mikahala — a  handful  of  Hawaiians, 
deck  passengers,  who  had  come  over  to 
visit  stricken  friends.  The  crowd  on  the 
landing  was  pathetic  enough;  the  little 
white  cloud  of  waving  handkerchiefs  more 
piteous  than  farewell  gestures  on  other 
[178] 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

wharves.  There  were  tears  among  our 
companions,  and  the  stout  young  woman 
in  the  white  liolohu  who  took,  at  once  to 
the  comfort  of  cigarettes  wept  the  most. 
It  was  good  to  reahze  that  in  one  httle  way 
we  had  served;  for  the  Mikahala,  having 
orders  to  wait  for  us,  had  given  the  other 
visitors  a  longer  time  than  usual.  Back 
in  our  exiguous  staterooms,  we  were  at 
liberty  to  be  fearfully  ill  in  perfect  peace 
while  the  Mikahala  churned  her  way  across 
the  channel  to  Lahaina. 

If  lurid  words  have  seemed  here  un- 
wontedly  to  fail  me,  it  is  because  Kalau- 
papa  is  not,  in  strictest  truth,  lurid.  Sights 
so  horrid  as  some  of  the  inhabitants  we 
encountered  I  shall  not,  I  hope,  soon  be- 
hold again.  But  to  say  that  the  bulk  of 
one's  impressions,  or  the  dominant  recol- 
lection, is  horrible  would  be  to  lie  damna- 
bly. Not  to  admit  that  the  spectacle  of 
[179] 


HAWAII: 

kindness  and  blitheness  and  sturdy  com- 
mon sense  is,  to  the  end,  unmarred,  would 
be  to  show  oneself  incapable  of  registering 
fact.  Any  imagination  can  construct  the 
tragedies  that  must  inevitably  drag  out 
their  slow  length  in  Kalaupapa.  I  am  not 
trying  to  whitewash  fate  or  to  rehabilitate 
pain.  But  the  mere  fact  that  those  dis- 
charged go  unwillingly  means  much;  for 
the  Hawaiians  have  no  instinctive  horror 
of  the  disease,  and  a  man  can  go  back  to 
his  own  people  without  difficulty.  If  any 
one  thinks  it  is  easy  to  construct  an  exile 
which  the  exiled  shall  love — and  love  when 
he  has  leprosy — let  him  go  and  give  un- 
needed  advice  to  those  who  have  made 
Kalaupapa  what  it  is.  I  have  no  pen  for 
"uplift";  and  it  is  a  sorry  chance  that  it 
is  so.  For  I  have  never  seen  anything  in 
our  contemporary  chaos  of  prophylactic 
legislation  and  humanitarian  hysteria  one 
I  180] 


03 


S 


SCENES  AND  IMPRESSIONS 

half  so  humanly  fine  as  what  has  been  done, 
as  quietly  as  the  coral-insect  builds  the 
reef,  on  the  low  promontory  of  windward 
Molokai. 


1181] 


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